PENGUIN LIFE
THE COMFORT BOOK
Matt Haig is the author of the internationally bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive and the
follow-up Notes on a Nervous Planet, along with six novels, including The Midnight Library, and
several award-winning children’s books. His work has been translated into more than thirty
languages.
ALSO BY MATT HAIG
The Last Family in England
The Dead Fathers Club
The Possession of Mr. Cave
The Radleys
The Humans
Humans: An A–Z
Reasons to Stay Alive
How to Stop Time
Notes on a Nervous Planet
The Midnight Library
For Children
The Runaway Troll
Shadow Forest
To Be a Cat
Echo Boy
A Boy Called Christmas
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
Father Christmas and Me
The Truth Pixie
Evie and the Animals
The Truth Pixie Goes to School
Evie in the Jungle
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Copyright © 2021 by Matt Haig
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Haig, Matt, 1975– author.
Title: The comfort book / Matt Haig.
Description: 1st. | [New York] : Penguin Life, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021002981 (print) | LCCN 2021002982 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143136668 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525508168
(ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Contentment. | Hope. | Happiness.
Classification: LCC BJ1533.C7 H345 2021 (print) | LCC BJ1533.C7 (ebook) | DDC 158.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002981
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002982
Cover design: Jason Ramirez
Cover image: Getty Images
Adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Matt Haig
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
A note on structure
Part One
Baby
You Are the Goal
A thing my dad said once when we were lost in a forest
It’s okay
Power
Nothing either good or bad
Change is real
To be is to let go
Somewhere
Songs that comfort me—a playlist
Mountain
Valley
Sum
The subject in the sentence
To remember during the bad days
For when you reach rock bottom
Rock
Ten books that helped my mind
Words
Words (two)
The power of why
The gaps of life
A few don’ts
Foundation
Purple saxifrage
Connected
A thing I discovered recently
Pear
Toast
Hummus
There is always a path through the forest
Pizza
A little plan
Ladders
Life is not
Life is
Chapter
Room
No
The maze
Knowledge and the forest
Minds and windows
A paradox
Crossroads
Happiness
One beautiful thing
Growth
Pasta
How to be random
The future is open
Being, not doing
Short
Peanut butter on toast
Part Two
River
Dam
Elements of hope
Delete the italics
Tips for how to make a bad day better
The most important kind of wealth
A reminder for the tough times
The goldsaddle goatfish
Rain
Truth and courage and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
Scroll your mind
Current
Good sad
Jaws and Nietzsche and death and life
Underwater
I hope this email finds you well
A note on the future
Beware because
Ten things that won’t make you happier
Check your armor
A human, being
You are waterproof
Part Three
Candle
A bag of moments
Your most treasured possession
Wolf
Burn
Virtue
An asymmetric tree is one hundred percent a tree
You are more than your worst behavior
Warm
Dream
Clarity
The importance of weird thinking
Outside
Realization
The way out of your mind is via the world
Joy Harjo and the one whole voice
Protection
Quantum freedom
Other people are other people
Wrong direction
Applied energy
Mess
Aim to be you
Cup
Pomegranate
Let it be
Part Four
The sky
Watch the stars
The universe is change
The Stoic slave
Caterpillar
Experience
A bit about breathing
What your breath tells you
Live in the raw
Honest seeing
Wait
The cure for loneliness
Patterns
The discomfort zone
Stuff
Ferris Bueller and the meaning of life
Films that comfort
Negative capability
Why break when you can bend?
We have more in common than we think
Forgiveness
A note on introversion
Resting is doing
Mystery
The comfort of uncertainty
Portal
Nothing is closed
The bearable rightness of being
Reconnection
A note on joy
A spinning coin
You are alive
One
One (two)
Power
Growing pains
How to look a demon in the eye
Remember
Opposites
Love/despair
Possibility
The door
The messy miracle of being here
Acceptance
Basic nowness
How to be an ocean
More
End
Acknowledgments
Permission credits
Do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives
effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you
feel better. . . . But if it were any different he could never have found
the words that he did.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Introduction
I sometimes write things down to comfort myself. Stuff learned in the bad
times. Thoughts. Meditations. Lists. Examples. Things I want to remind
myself of. Or things I have learned from other people or other lives.
It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life
lessons are learned while we are at our lowest. But then we never think
about food more than when we are hungry and we never think about life
rafts more than when we are thrown overboard.
So, these are some of my life rafts. The thoughts that have kept me afloat.
I hope some of them might carry you to dry land too.
A note on structure
This book is as messy as life.
It has a lot of short chapters and some longer ones. It contains lists and
aphorisms and quotes and case studies and more lists and even the
occasional recipe. It is influenced by experience but has moments of
inspiration taken from anything ranging from quantum physics to
philosophy, from movies I like to ancient religions to Instagram.
You can read it how you want. You can start at the beginning and end at
the end, or you can start at the end and end at the beginning, or you can just
dip into it.
You can crease the pages. You can tear out the pages. You can lend it to a
friend (though maybe not if you’ve torn out the pages). You can place it
beside your bed or keep it next to the toilet. You can throw it out of the
window. There are no rules.
There is a kind of accidental theme, though. The theme is connection. We
are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to
moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.
When times are hard, we need a deep kind of comfort. Something
elemental. A solid support. A rock to hold on to.
The kind we already have inside us. But which we sometimes need a bit
of help to see.
PART ONE
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Baby
Imagine yourself as a baby. You would look at that baby and think they
lacked nothing. That baby came complete. Their value was innate from
their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth
or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of a human
life. And that value stays with us, even as it becomes easier to forget it. We
stay precisely as alive and precisely as human as we were the day we were
born. The only thing we need is to exist. And to hope.
You are the goal
You don’t have to continually improve yourself to love yourself. Love is not
something you deserve only if you reach a goal. The world is one of
pressure but don’t let it squeeze your self-compassion. You were born
worthy of love and you remain worthy of love. Be kind to yourself.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
A thing my dad said once when we were lost in a
forest
Once upon a time, my father and I got lost in a forest in France. I must have
been about twelve or thirteen. Anyway, it was before the era when most
people owned a mobile phone. We were on vacation the rural, landlocked,
basic kind of middle-class vacation I didn’t really understand. It was in the
Loire Valley, and we had gone for a run. About half an hour in, my dad
realized the truth. “Oh, it seems that we’re lost.” We walked around and
around in circles, trying to find the path, but with no luck. My dad asked
two men—poachers—for directions and they sent us the wrong way. I could
tell my dad was starting to panic, even as he was trying to hide it from me.
We had been in the forest for hours now and both knew my mom would be
in a state of absolute terror. At school, I had just been told the Bible story of
the Israelites who had died in the wilderness and I found it easy to imagine
that would be our fate too. “If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out
of here,” my dad said.
And he was right. Eventually we heard the sound of cars and reached a
main road. We were eleven miles from the village where we had started off,
but at least we had signposts now. We were clear of the trees. And I often
think of that strategy, when I am totally lost—literally or metaphorically. I
thought of it when I was in the middle of a breakdown. When I was living
in a panic attack punctuated only by depression, when my heart pounded
rapidly with fear, when I hardly knew who I was and didn’t know how I
could carry on living. If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of
here. Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will
always get you further than running around in circles. It’s about the
determination to keep walking forward.
It’s okay
It’s okay to be broken.
It’s okay to wear the scars of experience.
It’s okay to be a mess.
It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.
It’s okay to be sentimental and whimsical and cry bittersweet tears at songs
and movies you aren’t supposed to love.
It’s okay to like what you like.
It’s okay to like things for literally no other reason than because you like
them and not because they are cool or clever or popular.
It’s okay to let people find you. You don’t have to spread yourself so thin
you become invisible. You don’t have to always be the person reaching out.
You can sometimes allow yourself to be reached. As the great writer Anne
Lamott puts it: “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island for boats to
save; they just stand there shining.”
It’s okay not to make the most of every chunk of time.
It’s okay to be who you are.
It’s okay.
Power
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, thought that if we
are distressed about something external, “the pain is not due to the thing
itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at
any moment.”
I love this, but also know from experience that finding that power can be
near impossible at times. We can’t just click our fingers and be rid of, say,
grief, or the stress of work, or health worries. When we are lost in the
forest, our fear might not be directly caused by the forest, or our being lost
in said forest, but while we are actively lost in the forest it very much feels
like the source of our fear is being lost in the forest.
But it is helpful to remember that our perspective is our world. And our
external circumstances don’t need to change in order for our perspective to
change. And the forests we find ourselves in are metaphorical, and
sometimes we are unable to escape them, but with a change of perspective
we can live among the trees.
Nothing either good or bad
When Hamlet tells his old university buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he
doesn’t mean this in a positive way. Shakespeare’s prince is in a foul and
depressed mood, but with reason. He is talking about Denmark, and indeed
the whole world, being a prison. For him, Denmark really is a physical and
psychological prison. But he is also aware that perspective plays a part in
this. And that the world and Denmark aren’t intrinsically bad. They are bad
from his perspective. They are bad because he thinks they are.
External events are neutral. They only gain positive or negative value the
moment they enter our minds. It is ultimately up to us how we greet these
things. It’s not always easy, sure, but there is a comfort in knowing it is
possible to view any single thing in multiple ways. It also empowers us,
because we aren’t at the mercy of the world we can never control, we are at
the mercy of a mind we can, potentially, with effort and determination,
begin to alter and expand. Our mind might make prisons, but it also gives
us keys.
Change is real
We turn keys all the time. Or rather: time turns keys all the time. Because
time means change.
And change is the nature of life. The reason to hope.
Neuroplasticity is the way our brains change their structure according to
the things we experience. None of us are the same people we were ten years
ago. When we feel or experience terrible things, it is useful to remember
that nothing lasts. Perspective shifts. We become different versions of
ourselves. The hardest question I have ever been asked is: “How do I stay
alive for other people if I have no one?” The answer is that you stay alive
for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also
the people you will be.
To be is to let go
Self-forgiveness makes the world better. You don’t become a good person
by believing you are a bad one.
Somewhere
Hope is a beautiful thing to find in art or stories or music. It is often a
surprise moment, like in The Shawshank Redemption when the poster of
Raquel Welch is pulled off the wall in Andy’s prison cell. Or in The Sound
of Music when Captain von Trapp switches from repressed widower to
singing father in the space of a single scene.
It is often subtle, but you know it when you feel it. Like when
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” effortlessly goes up a whole octave within
the word “somewhere,” jumping clean over seven natural keys—an actual
musical rainbow—before landing on the eighth. Hope always involves a
soaring and a reaching. Hope flies. The thing with feathers, as Emily
Dickinson said.
People often imagine it is hard to feel hopeful when times are tough, yet I
tend to think the opposite. Or at least, hope is the thing we most want to
cling on to in periods of despair or worry. I think that it’s no coincidence
that “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” one of the most bittersweet yet
hopeful songs in the world, a song that has topped polls as the greatest song
of the twentieth century, was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg for
The Wizard of Oz in one of the bleakest years in human history: 1939.
Harold wrote the music, while Yip penned the words. Harold and Yip
themselves were no strangers to suffering. Yip had seen the horrors of the
First World War and was left bankrupt following the crash of 1929. As for
Harold, who would become known for his hopeful octave-leaping, he was
born with a twin brother who sadly died in infancy. Aged sixteen, Harold
fled his Jewish Orthodox parents and pursued a modern musical path. And
let’s not forget these were two Jewish musicians writing arguably the most
hopeful song ever written, all while Adolf Hitler was triggering war and
antisemitism was on the rise.
• • •
To feel hope you don’t need to be in a great situation. You just need to
understand that things will change. Hope is available to all. You don’t need
to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to
know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark. We
can have our feet right here where we are, while our minds can hear another
octave, right over the rainbow. We can be half inside the present, half inside
the future. Half in Kansas, half in Oz.
Songs that comfort me—a playlist
(These aren’t all comforting lyrically, or comforting in a logical way, but
they all comfort me through the direct or indirect magic only music can
muster. You will have different ones. But I thought I’d share some of mine.)
“O-o-h Child”—The Five Stairsteps
“Here Comes the Sun”—The Beatles
“Dear Theodosia”—Hamilton soundtrack
“Don’t Worry Baby”—The Beach Boys
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—Judy Garland
“A Change Is Gonna Come”—Sam Cooke
“The People”—Common ft. Dwele
“The Boys of Summer”—Don Henley
“California”—Joni Mitchell
“Secret Garden”—Bruce Springsteen
“You Make It Easy”—Air
“These Dreams”—Heart
“True Faith”—New Order
“If You Leave”—OMD
“Ivy”—Frank Ocean
“Swim Good”—Frank Ocean
“Steppin’ Out”—Joe Jackson
“Pas de deux” from The Nutcracker—Tchaikovsky (not a song, obviously,
but an epic bittersweet comfort)
“If I Could Change Your Mind”—HAIM
“Space Cowboy”—Kacey Musgraves
“Hounds of Love”—either the Kate Bush or Futureheads version
“Enjoy the Silence”—Depeche Mode
“I Won’t Let You Down”—Ph.D.
“Just Like Heaven”—The Cure
“Promised Land”—Joe Smooth
Mountain
In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a
mountain that you pretend isn’t there.
Valley
When you feel low, it is important to bear in mind that thoughts inspired by
those feelings are not external, objective facts. For instance, when I was
twenty-four I was convinced I would never see my twenty-fifth birthday. I
knew for certain that I wouldn’t be able to survive for weeks or months with
the mental pain I was suddenly encountering. And yet here I am, aged forty-
five, writing this paragraph. Depression lies. And while the feelings
themselves were real, the things they led me to believe were resolutely not.
Because I didn’t really understand how I fell into suicidal depression, I
imagined I would never find my way out. I didn’t realize that there is
something bigger than depression, and that thing is time. Time disproves
the lies depression tells. Time showed me that the things depression
imagined for me were fallacies, not prophecies.
That doesn’t mean time dissolves all mental health issues. But it does
mean our attitudes and approaches to our own mind change and often
improve via sticking around long enough to gain the perspective despair
and fear refuse to give.
People talk of peaks and troughs in relation to mental health. Hills and
valleys. And such topographical metaphors make sense. You can definitely
feel the steep descents and uphill struggles in life. But it is important to
remember the bottom of the valley never has the clearest view. And that
sometimes all you need to do in order to rise up again is to keep moving
forward.
Sum
We are always bigger than the pain we feel. Always. The pain is not total.
When you say “I am in pain,” there is the pain and there is the I but the I is
always bigger than the pain. Because the I is there even without the pain,
while the pain is only there as a product of that I. And that I will survive
and go on to feel other things.
I used to struggle with understanding this. I used to think I was the pain. I
didn’t always think of depression as an experience. I thought of it as
something I was. Even as I walked away from a cliff-edge in Spain. Even as
I flew back to my parents’ house and told my loved ones I was going to be
okay. I called myself a depressive. I rarely said “I have depression” or “I am
currently experiencing depression” because I imagined the depression was
the sum of who I was. I was mistaking the film on the screen with the
cinema itself. I thought there would only ever be one film playing for all
eternity, on rotation. A Nightmare on Haig Street. (Sorry.) I didn’t realize
there would one day be showings of The Sound of Music and It’s a
Wonderful Life.
The trouble was that I had a very binary view of things. I thought you
were either well or ill, sane or insane, and once I was diagnosed with
depression I felt I had been exiled to a new land, like Napoleon, and that
there would be no escape back to the world I had known.
And in one sense I was right. I never really went back. I went forward.
Because that is what happens, whether we try for it or not, we move
forward, through time, simply by staying alive. And slowly our experiences
change. I, for instance, discovered little moments of happiness or humor
within despair. I realized things weren’t always one thing or another thing.
They were sometimes both.
And as soon as we notice all that space inside us, we have a new
perspective. Yes, there is room for a lot of pain, but there is room for other
things too. And indeed, pain might be a total asshole, but it can
inadvertently show us how much space we have inside. It can even expand
that space. And enable us to experience the equivalent quantity of joy or
hope or love or contentment at some future point in time.
So, in other words, it is important to always realize our own vastness.
Our own rooms. We are multiplexes of possibility.
The subject in the sentence
And yes, we might feel that others are judging our worth via metrics like
income and follower counts and weight and chest measurements and all the
rest of it, but always remember we are more than can be measured. We are
life itself. We aren’t the narrow band of feelings in a single moment. We are
the vessel that could contain any feeling. We are the subject in the sentence.
We are more than the sum of our achievements. We are more than the
feelings we witness. We are the infinity that remains when you subtract
them.
To remember during the bad days
It won’t last.
You have felt other things. You will feel other things again.
Emotions are like weather. They change and shift. Clouds can seem as still
as stone. We look at them and hardly notice a change at all. And yet they
always move.
The worst part of any experience is the part where you feel like you can’t
take it anymore. So, if you feel like you can’t take it anymore, the chances
are you are already at the worst point. The only feelings you have left to
experience are better than this one.
You are still here. And that is everything.
For when you reach rock bottom
You have survived everything you have been through, and you will survive
this too. Stay for the person you will become. You are more than a bad day,
or week, or month, or year, or even decade. You are a future of multifarious
possibility. You are another self at a point in future time looking back in
gratitude that this lost and former you held on. Stay.
Rock
The best thing about rock bottom is the rock part. You discover the solid bit
of you. The bit that can’t be broken down further. The thing that you might
sentimentally call a soul. At our lowest we find the solid ground of our
foundation. And we can build ourselves anew.
Ten books that helped my mind
1. Letters to a Young Poet—Rainer Maria Rilke
2. Poems—Emily Dickinson
3. Henry David Thoreau’s journal
4. When Things Fall Apart—Pema Chödrön
5. The House at Pooh Corner—A. A. Milne
6. Bird by Bird—Anne Lamott
7. Meditations—Marcus Aurelius
8. Tao Te Ching—Laozi
9. Serious Concerns—Wendy Cope
10. Dream Work—Mary Oliver
Words
At the university, doing my masters degree in English Literature, I
continually felt stupid, and the reason for this was that I had chosen a
module called “Critical Theory.” This involved reading a lot of French
postmodern and post-structuralist philosophy, which even when translated
into English contained so many apparently deliberately and playfully
obscure sentences that I had to stare at each one for about half an hour to
even begin to fathom it. In particular I studied just enough to know that
there is always a gap between the signifier and the signified. The word
“dog” is not a dog. The word “water” is not water. A painting of a pipe is
not a pipe. TV footage of a war is not a war. On the whole, these theories
came across as really complicated and obtuse ways to state the depressingly
obvious: we are always grasping after a meaning we can never quite reach.
But when I became ill, they took on a broader meaning. I felt like a
walking signifier, signifying a person I could never quite be. There was a
gap between what I looked like and what I felt like. And the only way to
bridge that gap was by talking and writing about what was going on inside
me. And yes, in the philosophical sense, words are never quite the thing
they describe, but that is also their use. They can help externalize internal
things. The moment we try and turn a thought into words we place it into a
shared world. This shared world we call “language.” Once we take our
personal unseen experiences and make them seen, we help others, and even
ourselves, to understand what we are going through. What we say aloud can
never quite capture what we feel inside, but that is almost the point.
Words don’t capture, they release.
Words (two)
So, yes.
Words are important.
Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can comfort.
There was a time when I couldn’t speak.
There was a time when my depression was so heavy my tongue wouldn’t
move. A time when the distance between the open gate of my mouth and
the storm of my mind seemed too far.
I could manage monosyllables, sometimes.
I could nod. I could mumble. But I sounded as if I were in slow motion.
Underwater.
I was lost.
To want to speak was to want to live. And in those depths I wanted
neither. I just wanted to want, if that makes sense.
I remembered reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings at school. I remember reading about how, as a child, she had stopped
talking for five years after suffering the most horrific sexual abuse at the
hands of her mothers boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. When the man was killed by
her uncles, eight-year-old Maya felt such guilt for his death that she stopped
talking, becoming effectively mute for years. It was through a family friend
and teacher, Bertha Flowers, that Maya was exposed to great writers. She
read Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens and Shakespeare and the poets
Georgia Douglas Johnson and Frances Harper. Slowly, through reading and
learning, Maya found her voice again, and never let it go. By the late 1960s
this mute girl had become one of the key voices of the civil rights
movement. A voice that not only spoke for herself, but for millions of
people facing racial discrimination.
Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with
the world, and to change our own and other people’s lives.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,”
wrote Angelou. Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we
can’t speak, we can write. When we can’t write, we can read. When we
can’t read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life.
And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.
The power of why
One thing I have been asked a few times is this: “Does writing about bad
experiences make you feel worse?”
I understand why people ask the question, but for me the answer is a
profound “No.”
I discovered this years ago. When I was very ill, at the lowest of the low,
when I could hardly speak, I wrote down what I was feeling. One day I
wrote down the words “invisible weight.” Another day I wrote “I wish I
could claw into my head and take out the part of my brain that makes me
feel like this.” There were even darker things I put down. But writing down
darkness didn’t make me feel dark. I already felt dark. Writing things down
brought that inner darkness into external light.
Nowadays, I sometimes write about what I want. The key to this is
honesty. Be brutally, humiliatingly honest. I recommend this.
For instance, you could write “I want a six-pack.”
And seeing that wish on the page might automatically make you realize
something about it. It might make you feel silly for having it. You might
already be awakening another part of you that helps you diminish the
craving. But either way, it is good to ask a single-word question after it.
“Why?” Why do I want a six-pack? Then to be entirely honest in your
answer. “I want to look good.” And again: “Why?” “For myself.” And then
you might stare at that answer for a while and feel you weren’t being
entirely honest. So you add: “To impress other people.” And then, like some
incessant Socrates, ask it again: “Why?” “Because I want their approval.”
“Why?” “Because I want to belong.” “Why?” And you can keep going,
deeper and deeper, through the tunnel of whys, until you reach the light of
realization. And the realization may be that wanting the six-pack wasn’t
really about the six-pack. It wasn’t about your body. It wasn’t even about
health or strength or fitness. It was about something else entirely.
Something that wouldn’t be fundamentally addressed or solved by gaining
the six-pack.
Writing, then, is a kind of seeing. A way to see your insecurities more
clearly. A way to shine a light on doubts and dreams and realize what they
are actually about. It can dissolve a whole puddle of worries in the bright
light of truth.
The gaps of life
If you take objects out of a room, one by one, two things will happen. The
first is obvious. You will miss some of the things you have taken away. The
second is that you will notice the things that remain more than ever. Your
attention will focus. You will be more likely to read the books that are left
on the shelves. You will appreciate the remaining chairs more. And if there
is a chess board, you are more likely to play chess. When things are taken
from us, the stuff that remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility
but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.
A few don’ts
Don’t envy things you wouldn’t actually want.
Don’t absorb criticism from people you wouldn’t go to for advice.
Don’t fear missing parties you would probably want to leave.
Don’t worry about fitting in. Be your own tribe.
Don’t argue with people who will never understand you.
Don’t believe anyone has it all figured out.
Don’t imagine there is an amount of money or success or fame that could
insulate you from pain.
Don’t think there is a type of face or job or relationship that safeguards
happiness.
Don’t say yes to things you wish you had the confidence to say no to.
Don’t worry if you do.
Foundation
Other people matter. But there is no point becoming someone else in order
to find friends. In order to find the people who like you, it is first necessary
to be you.
Purple saxifrage
The hardiest plant in the world is the purple saxifrage. It has delicate-
looking flowers, with purple petals that seem as though they might blow
away in the wind, yet it thrives in the Arctic. The flowers survive by
clustering together, low to the ground, offering each other shelter against
the hardest conditions on earth.
Connected
We all have an impact on each other. We are all connected in so many seen
and unseen ways. Which possibly explains why one of the simplest and
quickest routes to happiness seems to be to make someone else happy. The
reason to be selfless is selfish. Nothing makes ourselves feel better than not
thinking of our selves.
A thing I discovered recently
I love stillness. Slowness. When nothing is happening. The blueness of the
sky. Inhaling clear air. Birdsong over traffic. Lone footsteps. Spring flowers
blooming with defiance. I used to think the quiet patches felt dead. Now
they feel more alive. Like leaning over and listening to the earth’s heartbeat.
Pear
Forward momentum is great. But we also need sideways momentum. For
instance, I just sat down and ate a pear. I have no idea what the future holds
but I am very grateful that I am alive and able to sit on a sofa and eat a pear.
Toast
Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning
of toast. It is sometimes better just to eat the toast.
Hummus
Cooking can be therapeutic. But personally I find the most therapeutic kind
of cooking to be the kind where there is no actual cooking . Where the
recipe is so simple it is just a case of bringing all the ingredients together
and mixing them up. A kind of get-together for food. A literal mash-up.
And the thing I enjoy non-cooking the most is hummus. Hummus is in and
of itself a comforting food, which is probably why—when it eventually got
noticed beyond the Middle East—it took off very quickly. I don’t know
what it is about hummus that is so comforting. Yotam Ottolenghi talks of
the “emotive power” of hummus and how, within the Middle East, it sparks
serious rivalries. It feels, somehow, more than a food. It is the default dip.
Culinary oxygen. I struggle to imagine a world without it. Well, I can. But it
would be a slightly sadder world. I have been making my own variants for
years but only recently hit upon my favorite formula.
As for ingredients, take two tins of chickpeas, a massive scoop of tahini,
garlic (quantity-wise err on the side of incaution), a few glugs of olive oil,
the juice of one lemon, some water for texture, and a generous sprinkle each
of cumin, cayenne, and salt. Blend the lot. Serve with more cumin and oil.
Take some bread, preferably warm and fresh. An olive roll, pita, whatever.
Tear, and dunk, and enjoy.
There is always a path through the forest
I’ve spent much of my life thinking about hope. In recent years I’ve spent a
lot of time writing about it. Before then, I clutched hope like a security
blanket. In my twenties I had a breakdown. A fusion of severe depression
and panic disorder that made me fall so hard I spent three years of my life
desperately wanting to die. It is hard to cultivate hope in such a state of
despair, but, somehow, I gathered enough of it to stay alive and see a better
future.
Hope can feel in scarce supply for everyone these days. Global
pandemics, brutal injustices, political turmoil, and glaring inequalities can
all take their toll on your reserves. And yet, the thing with hope is that it is
persistent. It has the potential to exist even in the most troubled times.
Hope isn’t the same thing as happiness. You don’t need to be happy to be
hopeful. You need instead to accept the unknowability of the future, and
that there are versions of that future that could be better than the present.
Hope, in its simplest form, is the acceptance of possibility.
The acceptance that if we are suddenly lost in a forest, there will be a
way through.
All we need is a plan, and a little determination.
Pizza
The sky isn’t more beautiful if you have perfect skin. Music doesn’t sound
more interesting if you have a six-pack. Dogs aren’t better company if
you’re famous. P izza tastes good regardless of your job title. The best of
life exists beyond the things we are encouraged to crave.
A little plan
Be curious. Go outside. Get to bed on time. Hydrate. Breathe from the
diaphragm. Eat happy. Get a routine baggy enough to live in. Be kind.
Accept that not everyone will like you. Appreciate those who do. Don’t be
defined. Allow fuck-ups. Want what you already have. Learn to say no to
things that get in the way of life. And to say yes to the things that help you
live.
Ladders
We are often encouraged to see life as one continual uphill climb. We talk
about ladders without even thinking. Career ladders. Property ladders. Of
being on the top rung of the ladder. Or the bottom rung of the ladder. We
talk of climbing the ladder. We talk of rising up. We talk of uphill struggles.
In doing so we visualize life as a kind of vertical race, like we are human
skyscrapers reaching for the clouds. And we risk only ever looking above to
the future or below to the past and never around at the infinite horizontal
landscape of the present. The trouble with ladders is they give you no room
to move around. Just room to fall.
Life is not
a ladder to climb
a puzzle to solve
a key to find
a destination to reach
a problem to fix
Life is
“understood backward; but it must be lived forward”
(Søren Kierkegaard)
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants
nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not
merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but love it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Chapter
There is no point spending an entire life trying to win the love you didn’t
feel when you needed it. You sometimes just have to let go of an old story
and start your own. Give yourself some love. You can’t change the past.
You can’t change other people. You can change you though. You narrate
this story. So start to write a new chapter.
Room
Imagine forgiving yourself completely. The goals you didn’t reach. The
mistakes you made. Instead of locking those flaws inside to define and
repeat yourself, imagine letting your past float through your present and
away like air through a window, freshening a room. Imagine that.
No
No.
No, I don’t want to.
No, I don’t want to write that article for free.
No, I am not on for Tuesday.
No, I don’t want another drink.
No, I don’t agree with you on that actually.
No, I can’t always snap out of it.
No, I wasn’t rude when I didn’t get back to a message I never saw.
No, if it’s okay I don’t want to collaborate with you.
No, I am not dumbing down.
No, I can’t do any dates in July.
No, I don’t want your leaflet.
No, I don’t want to continue watching.
No, my niceness is not weakness.
No, they aren’t the next Beatles.
No, I’m not going to take that crap.
No, my masculinity does not mean I shouldn’t cry.
No, I don’t need to buy what you are selling.
No, I am not ashamed to make time for myself.
No, I am not going to your school reunion when you never spoke to me at
school.
No, I will no longer apologize for being myself.
No.
No is a good word. It keeps you sane. In an age of overload, no is really
yes. It is yes to having the space you need to live.
Be humble because you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of
stars.
Serbian proverb
The maze
It is rare to escape a maze on the first attempt. And when we are stuck in a
maze, we can’t escape by following the same path that got us lost. We
escape a maze by trying new routes. We don’t feel like we have failed when
we hit a dead end. In fact, we appreciate the new knowledge. There is now
a dead end we won’t try anymore. Every dead end and cul-de-sac helps us
escape the maze. To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong
ones.
Knowledge and the forest
“Know your enemy.” In the classic Chinese military treatise The Art of War,
Sun Tzu offered advice that echoed through the centuries.
It is timeless advice because of course it doesn’t just apply to war. If we
fully understand, say, depression, or a physical disease, or the nature of
climate change, or injustice, it helps us combat these things. Without
knowledge of our difficulties, we would be in trouble.
For instance, the average person plunged into the middle of the Amazon
rain forest would probably struggle to survive, because they wouldn’t
understand all the threats they faced. But Juliane Koepcke wasn’t an
average person. She was a person with knowledge.
On Christmas Eve 1971, aged seventeen, somewhere over Peru, Koepcke
fell through the sky strapped to her seat after lightning struck her plane. All
91 of the other people on board died, including her own mother, but she
survived the fall and managed to get out of her seat once it had fallen
through the jungle canopy.
Koepcke was in pain. She was in shock. She had a broken collar bone
and deep cuts on her legs. She was also in a state of fear for her own life. At
the sight of other dead bodies she felt “paralyzed by panic.” She grabbed
some provisions she found amid the debris and tried to find her way to
civilization.
Koepcke knew a lot about the rain forest. Her parents were both
zoologists. Before the crash, she had spent over a year living with them in a
research station within the Peruvian rain forest. In her own words she knew
that, armed with knowledge, it didn’t have to be the “green hell” people
imagined.
So, for instance, she knew that snakes could be camouflaged to look like
dried leaves. She knew the sounds of various bird calls. She knew which
signs to look for in order to find water and she ended up finding a creek.
Her dad had also once told her that if you followed the flow of running
water you would eventually find civilization.
As described in her book When I Fell from the Sky, she passed vultures
feeding on corpses. Snakes, mosquitoes, and deadly spiders were a
continual threat. One of her wounds became infested with maggots. She
suffered from the heat of the sun. But all the time she was aided by
knowledge.
She decided to walk as much as possible in the water of the stream, in
order to avoid snakes, spiders, and the poisonous plants of the jungle floor.
She stayed in the middle of the stream in order to avoid piranhas, which she
knew mainly swam in shallow water. She knew this would mean she would
probably encounter alligators, but she also knew that, unlike snakes,
alligators rarely attacked humans.
On and on she walked, as her infested wound grew ever more painful.
She had no food now. She felt weary and in a dream-like state. Yet she had
a determination she believed was passed down from her father: ‘When we
have really resolved to achieve something,’ my father once said, ‘we
succeed. We only have to want it, Juliane.’
She stayed on the lookout for jungle paths, found one, and then followed
it. It led her to a deserted hut that had a liter of petrol outside. She had also
been taught that in an emergency petrol can be a (painful) remedy for
severely infected wounds, so she used it to dress her own injury.
Eventually, on the eleventh day, she heard human voices and the jungle-
dwelling men who found her took her on a long boat trip back to
civilization. The day after her rescue she was reunited with her father.
Koepcke’s story would eventually be the subject of the Werner Herzog–
directed documentary Wings of Hope, Herzog himself having originally
been an intended passenger on the ill-fated plane. Juliane graduated in
biology and kept the family tradition of zoology alive, as she is currently
the librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich.
Of course, it is unlikely we will find ourselves in the middle of the
Amazon stranded after a plane crash. But when we find ourselves lost and
stranded in the tangled forests of our own lives we can still get to know the
territory. And face up to our wounds and be aware of the metaphorical
snakes in the undergrowth, not hindered by ignorance or denial, but armed
with self-awareness.
Minds and windows
Self-awareness can be hard. Your mind is not always to be trusted. It
sometimes lies, or plays tricks, or doesn’t give you the full picture. It can
convince you that you are terrible.
A mind is real as a mind in the same way a window is real as a window.
But that doesn’t mean the view you see through the window is the full view.
Sometimes the glass is dirty, or clouded, or rain-specked, and sometimes
the view is obscured by a big lorry that has parked right in front of it. The
window could also be entirely misleading. For instance, if your only view
was through a red stained-glass window you might perceive the world to be
as red and forbidding as a Martian desert. Even if there was nothing out
there but lush green fields.
A paradox
A therapist once told me that the most common complaint he heard from his
patients was the feeling that they didn’t belong. The feeling of being an
imposter, or of being outside things, of not fitting in. Of failing to connect
easily with people. I found this as reassuring as it was paradoxical. That one
of the most common feelings among people was the feeling of not fitting in
among people. The comfort, then, is the weird truth that in one sense we
have most in common with others when we feel awkward and alone.
Isolation is as universal as it gets.
Crossroads
Sometimes when we have a decision to make, we feel we need to be fast.
Indeed, the word “decisive” is often used as a synonym of fast. But when
we find ourselves at a crossroads it is often better to stop, wait a while at the
lights and check the map. After all, movement isn’t progress if we are
heading in the wrong direction.
Happiness
Happiness occurs when you forget who you’re expected to be. And what
you’re expected to do. Happiness is an accident of self-acceptance. It’s the
warm breeze you feel when you open the door to who you are.
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so
long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened
for us.
Helen Keller, We Bereaved
One beautiful thing
Experience one beautiful thing a day. However small. However trivial.
Read a poem. Play a favorite song. Laugh with a friend. Gaze at the sky just
before the sun’s final tumble toward night. Watch a classic movie. Eat a
slice of lemon drizzle cake. Whatever. Just give yourself one simple
reminder that the world is full of wonders. Even if we are at a point in life
where we can’t appreciate things, it sometimes helps to remember there are
things in this world to enjoy, when we are ready.
Growth
We grow through hard times. Growth is change. And when everything is
easy, we have no reason to change. The most painful moments in life
expand us. And when the pain leaves, space remains. Space we can fill with
life itself.
Pasta
No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.
How to be random
When I am in search of some evidence of the freak randomness of my
existence, I think of the generations directly above me. I think of my
grandmother, on my fathers side, who studied art at Central Saint Martins
in the 1930s. As part of her course she had a years placement at an art
college in Vienna. While there she witnessed Hitlers annexation of Austria
into Nazi Germany in 1938. My grandmother was Jewish. And almost
immediately after the annexation—the Anschluss—Jewish people were
targeted. Paraded in the street, made to clean graffiti, publicly humiliated.
My grandmother got out. She caught the very last train to France she could
find, and according to family legend was allowed on board only after
flirting with the Nazi guard at the station. She was barely more than a
teenager. Then, directly because of this proximity to the terrors of Nazism,
when war broke out she decided to become a volunteer nurse and fell in
love with my grandfather after he suffered burn injuries during the Blitz.
• • •
They had three children. One was my father, who in the 1960s dropped out
of Oxford University to study architecture in Sheffield. It was there he met
my mother, who had dropped out of drama school in Bristol to go to teacher
training college in South Yorkshire. My mother, who had been abandoned
as a baby for reasons she still doesn’t understand, grew up with her adoptive
parents on a farm in Devon, hundreds of miles away from my fathers
childhood home in Sussex, their paths not crossing until they both entered
Sheffield’s Queen’s Head pub one day in 1969.
• • •
This is not that remarkable a story. Or rather, it is equally as remarkable as
everyone’s origin story. We all come from randomness. We exist out of
uncertainty. Out of near impossibility. And yet we exist. So, when you feel
the odds are against you it is important to realize that they are never so
against you as they were when you didn’t exist. And there you are, we are,
existing.
The future is open
You don’t need to know the future to be hopeful. You just need to embrace
the concept of possibility. To accept that the unknowability of the future is
the key, and that there are versions of that future that are brighter and fairer
than the present. The future is open.
Being, not doing
You don’t need to exhaust yourself trying to find your own value. You are
not an iPhone needing an upgrade. Your value is not a condition of
productivity or exercise or body shape or something you lose via inactivity.
Value is not a plate that needs to be continually spun. The value is there. It
is intrinsic, innate. It is in the “being” not the “doing.”
Short
Life is short. Be kind.
Peanut butter on toast
You will need:
Two slices of bread
A jar of peanut butter
Method:
1. Place the slices of bread in a toaster.
2. Wait a minute or two. Remove the toasted bread from the toaster and
transfer to a plate.
3. With a knife, spread the peanut butter generously onto one side of the
toast. Spread the peanut butter with the knife always traveling in the
same direction over the toast. I don’t know why. It just feels better this
way.
4. Don’t rush it. Set the mood of appreciation by moving the knife at a
steady, Tai Chi kind of pace. This moment should have the integrity of
a religious ritual.
5. Take the plate of toast to your favorite seat. Sit. Compose yourself. Be
fully aware of how wondrous it is to be sentient. To be aware you are
not only alive as a human being, but as a human being about to eat
some peanut butter on toast.
6. Close your eyes as you take the first bite. Let your worries float by,
untethered from their hooks, as you appreciate this living moment of
taste and pleasure.
7. If you really don’t like peanut butter, this ritual of gratitude and
attentiveness has also been proven to work with marmalade.
PART TWO
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. Now, you put water
into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the
bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or
it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
River
People talk a lot about flow. Workflow. Musical flow. Yoga flow. Life flow.
If we are stressed about something we might be advised to “go with” the
flow. What does this even mean? In Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse’s novel
about one man’s spiritual discovery, he writes “the river is everywhere.”
The story is indeed partly centered around a river. The central character,
Siddhartha himself, aims to live his life near a river that provides him with
spiritual inspiration. The voices in the river teach him acceptance and
spirituality. On the edge of suicide, he falls into a deep sleep and is saved by
the soothing voice of the river that helps him discover a spirituality he’d
never known. Later, the river teaches him that time is an illusion and that all
his problems and pains are part of a larger fellowship of nature. Individual
events mean nothing by themselves, but are part of a larger totality and can
only be understood within the whole. This is what the river teaches him.
For me, the flow of life is about accepting things as part of something
bigger. Accepting every molecule of water as part of the river. This
comforts me when I have moments of torment or suffering.
Pain is selfish. It demands full attention. But each moment is part of a
totality. Each moment is a brush stroke in a painting—let’s say a painting of
a river—which, when we stand back, can be rather beautiful. I have had
moments of pain so strong I wanted everything to end. But standing back,
they’re just shadows accentuating light.
Dam
Let them flow. All those unspoken thoughts. All those suppressed emotions.
All those unacknowledged difficulties. All those guilty secrets. All those
painful memories. All those hidden corners. All those awkward truths. All
those undressed wounds. All those uncomfortable ideas. All those latent
longings and denied desires. All that water building behind the dam. Don’t
wait for that pressure to build. Don’t wait to burst wide open. Let them
flow. Let them flow. Let them flow.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and
he’s not the same man.
Heraclitus
Elements of hope
Earth, water, fire, air.
Everything connects.
Everything in the universe relates to every other thing in the universe.
“You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa,” said the physicist Richard
Feynman. “All mass is interaction.” And maybe what is true for matter is
true for psychology and our emotional selves. Pain connects to pleasure
through time. A pleasurable present evolves and connects to the pain of
grief, when it becomes a memory. But so too, inside deep despair, the
knowledge of better times (or even the knowledge of potential better times)
can help get you through. And sometimes, even within those moments of
despair, we can reach pleasure via the despair. I have to be careful how I
phrase this, as I am not entirely sure I understand it, but there was a kind of
pleasure I knew from inside depression. I don’t mean to diminish the
depression. It was intense, and life-threatening, and I wanted it to end and
had no idea when or how it would, but—but—despite that—no, because of
that—when I experienced a moment of beauty or relief it would take on so
much power. The night sky would almost sing with beauty. A kiss or a hug
would be magnified with meaning. It was almost as though, in those
moments, life outside my mind sensed the destructive force within me and
was trying to combat it with wonder.
Consider how every human body contains trace elements such as copper
and zinc and gold, amid the massive amounts of carbon and oxygen and
hydrogen. Similarly, if we could analyze every negative experience we’ve
ever had we would find vast quantities of emotions such as fear and despair,
and also trace elements of other things. Joy, hope, love, happiness. And in
the darkness even the tiniest fragments of light can shine, capture our
attention and maybe even lead us home.
Delete the italics
I am not popular enough.
I am not good enough.
I am not strong enough.
I am not lovable enough.
I am not attractive enough.
I am not cool enough.
I am not hot enough.
I am not clever enough.
I am not funny enough.
I am not educated enough.
I am not Oxford enough.
I am not literary enough.
I am not rich enough.
I am not posh enough.
I am not young enough.
I am not tough enough.
I am not well-traveled enough.
I am not talented enough.
I am not cultured enough.
I am not smooth-skinned enough.
I am not thin enough.
I am not muscular enough.
I am not famous enough.
I am not interesting enough.
I am not worth enough.
(I am enough.)
Tips for how to make a bad day better
Get up. Get washed. Get dressed. Stand up. Move your body. Put your
phone in another room. Go for a walk. Stretch. Place your legs against the
wall. Get some sunlight, if there is some available. Head, if you can, to
somewhere green. A garden, a park, a field, a meadow, a forest. Breathe
deeply and slowly and consciously for a little while. Phone someone you
love. If there is a nagging thing you are expected to do, but really don’t
want to do, cancel it now. Do it now. If you can, cook a good meal and
concentrate on the process. Cooking is the best kind of active meditation.
Avoid artificial blue light, especially after dark. Allow bad thoughts,
because that way they pass through quicker. Watch some TV you really
like. But before you watch it, work out how long you want to watch for, and
stick to it. If it is a clear night, watch the stars, just as Marcus Aurelius did
in times of turmoil nearly two thousand years ago. Go to bed before
midnight. Don’t try too hard to get to sleep. Just allow your mind to absorb
the day, and let all those fears and frustrations float through.
The most important kind of wealth
In 1981, American philosophy graduate Steven Callahan found himself
adrift in the Atlantic for seventy-six days. He had been sailing a sloop he
had designed and built, the Napoleon Solo. He was seven days into a
voyage from Cornwall to Antigua.
One night, during a storm, the boat was hit by a whale. The boat was
quickly flooded and started to sink. Callahan escaped onto an inflatable life
raft but also managed to hold his breath and dive down into his boat a few
times to get hold of essential supplies. These supplies included a small
amount of food, navigation charts, flares, a spear gun, and sleeping bag.
He was then set entirely adrift from the boat. He was 800 miles west of
the Canary Islands but heading in the opposite direction. He had enough
food and water to last him only a few days.
He fished with the spear gun and made water with a solar still, a
contraption that evaporates saltwater and distills it and then purifies it. It
took him days to get it working properly.
There were many moments of dashed hope. For instance, on the
fourteenth day he saw a ship and lit a flare and thought he had been seen.
But no such luck. He saw other ships, but again no one saw him, and soon
he was south of the shipping lanes, heading into hotter and hotter weather.
The discomfort was immense. The hunger. The thirst. The heat. The
saltwater sores on his skin.
Mentally, according to his own accounts, it was also tough. Not just the
continual threat of sharks, but his own thoughts.
“I had a lot of time to think, and I regretted every mistake I’d ever made,”
he told the Guardian newspaper in 2012. “I was divorced, and felt I had
failed at human relations generally, at business and now even at sailing. I
desperately wanted to get through it so I could make a better job of my
life.”
Fifty days in, and things were looking hopeless.
He had spent over a week trying to keep the damaged raft afloat with a
pump, and he had no more energy. He broke down. But pulled himself
together just enough to find a way to temporarily fix the raft.
Then his contraption to purify his water broke. He knew, logically, he
was going to die, as he had only three cans of water left. He felt his mind,
as well as his body, shutting down. He had lost a third of his weight. He had
nothing else to give. His use of flares and beacons had triggered no rescue
attempt.
“I could feel all the people who had ever been lost at sea around me.”
At some point he threw discarded fish guts back into the sea. Which
caused seabirds to hover above him.
The seabirds drew the attention of some fishermen from the Guadeloupe
archipelago. They found Callahan on his seventy-sixth day on the raft and
took him to shore, where he would eventually recover in the hospital.
Although the ordeal was terrifying, and nearly cost him his life, Callahan
didn’t regret having gone through it. And it never put him off sailing.
In his book Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea he writes of how he no
longer regrets his life, and how he has learned to be grateful. “My plight has
given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each
moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness.”
Even more remarkable is his memory of beautiful moments within his
ordeal. The sight of a clear, starry night sky overwhelmed him with awe. “A
view of heaven from a seat in hell.”
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No
feeling is final.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
A reminder for the tough times
One day this will be over. And we will be grateful for life in ways we never
felt possible before.
The goldsaddle goatfish
The goldsaddle goatfish is a beautiful golden fish—similar in size and
behavior to a red mullet—vulnerable to numerous larger predators,
including humans, within the waters around Hawaii. Local divers around
the region have recently begun to notice a striking and much larger fish, of
an identical yellow-gold color, swimming in the same sea. When divers
swim right next to this big fish it stops being a big fish altogether, breaking
up into eight or so standard-sized goldsaddle goatfish. It appears that the
fish swim extremely close together, in a perfect fish-shaped pattern, when
they feel threatened. Another one of the million examples in nature of how
we living creatures shed our vulnerability when we join together and swim
as one.
Humans, too, can be saved by each other. Each years human rights
struggles, catastrophes, or pandemics are examples of how people pull
together in a crisis. How neighbors turn to neighbors. Friends to friends.
Allies to allies. We have each other. Togetherness is a rule of nature.
Rain
You don’t have to be positive. You don’t have to feel guilty about fear or
sadness or anger. You don’t stop the rain by telling it to stop. Sometimes
you just have to let it pour, let it soak you to your skin. It never rains
forever. And know that, however wet you get, you are not the rain. You are
not the bad feelings in your head. You are the person experiencing the
storm. The storm may knock you off your feet. But you will stand again.
Hold on.
Truth and courage and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
“Be yourself” is perhaps the most common life advice on the planet, yet it is
not always easy—or even possible—to follow. Imagine your own gender
identity or sexual orientation being met with stigma and criminalisation.
Imagine, for instance, being a teenage boy in Germany in the 1830s and
realizing, without a single doubt, that you were attracted solely to males.
Maybe you would try to hide or suppress it, or deny it. It is unlikely you
would tell your family. And indeed Karl Heinrich Ulrichs waited until 1862,
when he was in his late thirties, before telling his parents he was an Urning
(a term he himself coined, derived from Plato’s Symposium) and attracted to
men. Once he had taken that step, he took another, bigger one. He began to
write about the need for sexual reform. At first he did this anonymously, but
soon he did so under his own name. His writings advocating for a scientific
understanding of homosexuality continually brought him trouble with the
law, and yet he kept writing. He stood in front of the Congress of German
Jurists in Munich and demanded the repeal of anti-homosexual laws even as
he was shouted down.
Now recognized as a groundbreaking figure in the history of gay rights,
Ulrichs had no easy life. His message and campaigning and even his very
identity was met with fiery opposition. His books were banned and
confiscated by police in Saxony and Berlin and throughout Prussia. Yet his
spirit remained unwavering, and not confined to the subject of gay rights
either (he was once imprisoned for opposing Prussian rule after the
annexation of Hanover). Later his health faltered, so he moved south to
Italy, where it improved and where he kept writing and publishing his work
at his own expense.
His legacy today is immense. Professor Robert Beachy has referred to
him as the first person to publicly “come out.” There are streets named after
him across Germany. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender & Intersex Law Association now has an award in his name.
Though the personal cost for Ulrichs was huge, it is clear he had no
regrets about being himself. He didn’t need to wait for the vindication of the
future to realize he had done the right thing in standing up for people
marginalized and punished for being themselves. “Until my dying day,” he
wrote, nearing the end of his life, “I will look back with pride that I found
the courage to come face-to-face in battle against the specter that for time
immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature.
Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was
tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow
to the hydra of public contempt.”
It is important to remember that while in our century there remain people
ready to stigmatize and criminalize identities and beliefs they don’t
understand, there are also people like Ulrichs, ready to stand up and be
themselves at whatever personal cost. And that is a deep inspiration—
indeed a deep comfort—to everyone who has felt stigmatized or
marginalized or like their truth is at odds with their time.
Scroll your mind
Social media can be a gallery of lives you aren’t living. Of diets you aren’t
following. Of parties you’re not attending. Of vacations you’re not on. Of
fun you’re not having. So, cut yourself a break and scroll your mind
instead. Scroll your consciousness for reasons to be grateful to be you. The
only fear of missing out that matters is the fear of missing out on yourself.
Current
Even though I have largely recovered from depression, the door is never
quite closed, always slightly ajar. I sometimes feel it, light like the ghost of
a breeze, very much there. Unseen, but felt. I accept this now but it took
time. The binary system of illness and wellness I used to believe in meant
you were either one or the other. This was dangerous, because it meant that
whenever I began to feel a tiny bit ill again, I would become deeply anxious
and depressed that I was back to being properly ill. It would become a self-
fulfilling prophecy. I would become ill because I believed I was.
The reality of health, and particularly mental health, is often ambiguous.
It is not quite one thing or another. We have a thousand labels for different
mild to severe conditions, but reality isn’t a simple jar we can stick a label
on, to say this is what it is, and it will never change. And nor is mental
health something we can clear up once and for all, but rather something we
always have to attend to, like a garden that needs nurturing, for as long as
we live.
Accepting this is both discomforting and comforting. It is discomforting
because it means we have to accept that bad feelings and memories can
return, and it is comforting because we know that if they do we will be
ready for them, and accepting of what they are, transient and changing.
We can move against the current of life, and forever meet resistance, or
we can let our thoughts flow, and become the free uncertain river.
Good sad
Do you ever get a kind of gentle sadness that almost feels good? Like a
nostalgia for a lost past or a stolen future that is mournful but also reminds
you that life is capable of such warm things? And that you were there to
witness them?
( I do.)
Jaws and Nietzsche and death and life
We exist, then we cease to exist. It is okay to feel fear about this. In fact, it
might be preferable. As the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote:
“To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that
underlies everything.” Fear is not something to be ashamed of. But fear of
death is another fear of the future, another fear of the abstract that takes us
away from the present, so the answer to our fear is here, and it is now, and it
is real.
When I was in the depths of a breakdown, my fear of life and fear of
death were equally matched. I was scared of the pain of living, and I was
scared of the annihilation of death. It seems paradoxical but I was never
more scared of death than when I was actively suicidal. And the two things
seemed intrinsically related. They were opposites but they were also the
same. Fear is compounded by uncertainty and choosing something takes the
pain of that uncertainty and turns it into something controllable. It is stupid,
really. I wanted to die because I didn’t want to die.
It seems to me that the fear of death, like the fear of anything, is made
worse when we don’t talk about it and make it visible. Fears become
stronger when we don’t see them. People fear great white sharks, unfairly,
because of the film Jaws. One of many interesting facts about that seminal
summer blockbuster is that we don’t see the shark fully until we are one
hour and twenty-one minutes into the film, which is way past the halfway
point. Now there are boringly practical reasons for that—chiefly that the
mechanical shark rarely worked during filming—but that doesn’t
undermine the point: the shark is scarier for not being seen.
The same, I would say, is true of death. Even more than sex, death is a
teeth-grindingly uncomfortable subject for many human beings, certainly
those of us living in modern Western cultures. And yet death forms the
basis for so many of our deepest concerns.
And it is a part of life. It helps define life. It raises the value of our time
here, and the value of the people we spend it with. The silence at the end of
the song is as important as the song itself.
Or, as Nietzsche put it: “The end of a melody is not its goal: but
nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached
its goal either.”
Underwater
We are where we need to be. We have never lived in the past. There is no
past. There is no future. There is just a series of presents. One after the
other. And although there are an infinite number of meditations and online
tutorials teaching us how to “inhabit the present,” we already do this
without trying. We always inhabit the present. “Forever is composed of
nows,” as Emily Dickinson told us. So being “in the now” is something we
don’t have to work at. When we are imagining our future or mourning the
past we aren’t in either—we are inhabiting the present, and only the present,
because a memory or dream is remembered or dreamed with the tools and
texture of the present. It is always today. Yesterday and tomorrow are also
todays.
But of course, when we talk about inhabiting the present we mean
something else. We are talking about how to actually enjoy the present, free
from worries. To actually live it the way we imagine some other animals
manage to, without fretting about what is to come, or without scrolling
through Instagram until our thumb falls off. To live. To “launch yourself on
every wave” and “find your eternity in each moment” in the words of Henry
David Thoreau. Though, to be perfectly honest, that sounds a little
exhausting and maybe just a tad impractical. There are some moments that
are simply going to be a little bit mediocre and unnoticed. The pressure to
live so deeply in every moment could also make us feel like we have one
more thing to fail at. And the irony for me is that I was closest to finding
eternity in every moment when I was suicidally depressed. At that point I
was agonizingly aware of being in the moment. And every moment felt like
forever. A day was a lifetime. The waves of time I was being launched into
were drowning me. I was underwater and I couldn’t breathe.
I would have done anything not to be inside the moment. To be unaware
of the moment. To achieve not mindfulness, but total mindlessness. To fast-
track into a better future or hitch-hike back to the past.
So, for me, the aim of “being in the moment” is not enough. I want to be
sure that being in the moment won’t kill me.
One key barrier to enjoying the present is the fact that a lot of us—me
included—are completists. We can’t just sit there basking in being, because
of all those unfinished things. Those unanswered emails, and unpaid bills,
and unmet goals. How can we just be when there is so much to do?
The hardest dream of all to achieve is the dream of not being tormented
by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural
human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from
the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other
people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the moment without any
other agenda, to exist as freely as time itself.
I hope this email finds you well
I hope this email finds you calm.
I hope this email finds you unflustered about your inbox.
I hope this email finds you in a state of acceptance that this email isn’t
exactly important in the cosmic scheme of things.
I hope this email finds your work happily unfinished.
I hope this email finds you beneath a beautiful sky with the wind tenderly
caressing your hair like an invisible mother.
I hope this email finds you lying on a beach, or maybe beside a lake.
I hope this email finds you with the sunlight on your face.
I hope this email finds you eating some blissfully sweet grapes.
I hope this email finds you well but, you know what, it is okay if it doesn’t
because we all have bad days.
I hope this email finds you reading a really good poem or something else
that requires no direct response from you.
I hope this email finds you far away from this email.
A note on the future
Our anxieties and insecurities, particularly it seems in the West, are shaped
by our demand that the future be free from worry. But of course we can’t
ever have such assurance. The future sits there with pen in hand, refusing to
sign that particular contract.
Alan Watts, a British philosopher heavily influenced by Eastern
philosophy and spirituality, reminded us that the future is inherently
unknown. “If . . . we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are
certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best
plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.” So, in
other words, if we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be
happy, we can’t be happy. It is like demanding the sea be entirely still
before we sail on it.
Beware because
Your value never needs to be justified. You aren’t valuable because you
work hard or earn a lot or can jump high or have a six-pack or you built a
business or you are kind or look good in selfies or present a TV show or can
sit at the piano and play “Für Elise” off by heart. Your value has no
because. You are the right quantity. You are a full cup. You are worth
yourself, and that is always enough.
Ten things that won’t make you happier
1. Wanting to be someone you aren’t.
2. Wishing you could undo a past that can’t be undone.
3. Taking out your hurt on people who didn’t cause your hurt.
4. Trying to distract yourself from pain by doing something that creates
more pain.
5. Being unable to forgive yourself.
6. Waiting for people to understand you when they don’t even understand
themselves.
7. Imagining happiness is the place you reach when you get everything
done.
8. Trying to control things in a universe characterized by unpredictability.
9. Avoiding painful memories by resisting a contented present.
10. The belief that you have to be happy.
Check your armor
Check your emotional armor is actually protecting you, and not so heavy
you can’t move.
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you
have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and
creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether
you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
Anne Lamott, Berkeley commencement address
A human, being
Your worth is you. Your worth is your presence. Your worth is right there.
Your worth isn’t something you earn. Your worth isn’t something you buy.
Your worth isn’t something you gain through status or popularity or
stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your
existence. You were born with worth, as all babies are, and that worth
doesn’t disappear simply because you have grown a little older. You are a
human, being.
You are waterproof
It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the
rain.
PART THREE
Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us.
Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
Candle
When things go dark, we can’t see what we have. That doesn’t mean we
don’t have those things. Those things remain, right there in front of us. All
we need is to light a candle, or ignite some hope, and we can see that what
we thought was lost was merely hidden.
A bag of moments
Happy moments are precious. We need to hold on to them. Save them.
Write them down. Place them in a bag. Have that metaphorical bag with
you, for when it seems happy moments could never exist. Sometimes just to
be reminded of happiness makes it more possible.
Your most treasured possession
The present is known. The future is unknown. The present is solid. The
future is abstract. Ruining the present by worrying about the future is like
burning your most treasured possession simply because you might one day
lose other possessions that you don’t own yet.
Wolf
Crying releases stress hormones. Swearing increases pain tolerance. Fury
can motivate us into action.
Feel what you feel.
Silence and smiles aren’t the only way to respond to pain.
Sometimes it is good to howl.
Burn
I once accidentally set fire to my leg.
I was sixteen years old. It was New Years Eve. I had, quite typically for
this period of my existence, drunk a lot of cider.
I was at a sleepover party in a friend’s garden. There was a fire outside
because it was a cold night, as winter nights tend to be in Nottinghamshire.
Anyway, I was obviously too close to the fire because people were
pointing at my leg and shouting wildly and then I looked down and saw my
jeans were ablaze.
I quickly patted down my leg and others joined in. The fire was put out
but my leg was in agony. I went inside my friend’s house and inspected the
wound. It covered about a third of my left thigh. Shades of purple. Oozing.
Glistening. Disgusting.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” people asked.
For reasons I still can’t fathom, beyond a deep teenage awkwardness and
self-consciousness that was stronger than any pain, I turned down the offer
to have an ambulance collect me. But during the night the pain was too
intense to sleep, and as I focused on the wound it became increasingly all-
encompassing.
So I walked the six miles home, beside a train track. Limping, I was
sober now, and the pain was intense—a pulsing kind of pain that was
making me delirious.
If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here . . .
At one point I had to stop. I sat down and closed my eyes. A freight train
thundered past. I thought I would never make it home. But somehow, I did.
As soon as I got home my sister saw the wound. She gasped and nearly
fainted and said I needed to go to the hospital straightaway, and so I went.
My wound was dressed.
“You must never wait in pain,” said the specialist, or words to that effect.
It was a message I would think of years later when I was suicidal. “You
must see to it straightaway. It doesn’t go away by pretending it isn’t there.”
Virtue
It is entirely human to be imperfect. It is entirely human to be flawed. It is
entirely human to have certain prejudices and have internalized some of the
more dubious characteristics of the place and time we live in and the
environment we grew up in. No one is above the terrifying and miraculous
mess of our species. Humans have the capacity for moments of brilliance
and goodness, but also an awful lot of fucking up. If we see problematic
people only as “people other than us,” we are never going to have the
courage to transform ourselves. And it does take courage. Courage, as
Maya Angelou put it, is the most important of the virtues because “without
courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.” Courage is
essential for us to look at ourselves without shying away. And, of course, if
we make it entirely forbidden to be problematic, we are never going to
admit to or address or fix our own flaws with honesty. We need open light
to grow. Virtue isn’t something we gain simply by pointing to bad things
outside ourselves and making ourselves feel good by contrast. True virtue is
something we achieve by looking inward, to our own motives and flaws and
cravings, and addressing those sticky and difficult and contradictory parts
of ourselves.
( Virtue is a journey, not a destination.)
An asymmetric tree is one hundred percent a tree
Perfection belongs to another world. Back in ancient Greece, Plato talked
about the importance of thinking of ideal forms of things. Ideal love, ideal
society, ideal government, ideal shapes. It was important to know how
things could be perfect in order to make them better, was the general idea.
There might not be such a thing as a perfect square in the whole of nature,
but it helps an architect or town planner to know the ideal version of a
square so they can take it from the abstract realm and try their best to
replicate it. It helps to know what the perfect form of friendship or
education or justice might look like, too, so friends and teachers and judges
can replicate it.
All great stuff, and I am not about to start a fight with Plato, as he was a
wrestler as well as a philosopher apparently, but the problems start when we
are told we can reach perfection with the right bank account or app or
personal trainer. And then we remain imperfect, as all things are, and we
might feel even worse for having believed this perfect Platonic world exists.
Another reason I don’t have to fight with Plato is because Aristotle
already did. Aristotle, himself a one-time student of Plato’s, had a looser,
more earth-bound approach to life. He believed that we shouldn’t focus on
an abstract world of essential forms because this world right here—this one
we live on—contains those essential forms. For Plato a tree was always a
poor imitation of an ideal tree, whereas for Aristotle a tree always contains
its essential tree-ness in its very substance.
The trouble with perfect abstract ideals that we want to reach is that we
never get there. They are untouchable rainbows. Far better, I reckon, to find
a comfort in the world itself. To try and see trees as essential versions of
trees, and ourselves as essential versions of ourselves, and to cultivate the
essential spirit of rather than to reach for something that doesn’t and can’t
exist and watch it forever slip through our fingers.
Work with what you have. Exist in this world. Be the asymmetric square.
Be the wonky tree. Be the real you.
You are more than your worst behavior
If you tell a child they are useless, they’ll begin to believe they are useless.
If you tell yourself you are useless, the same thing happens. The depressed
person who believes that people hate them is more likely to act in ways that
fulfill that expectation. And if we believe people must fall into the crudely
divided binaries of “good” and “bad,” we can easily risk judging ourselves
forever because of one mistake.
We need kindness. We need a way to see the difference between who
people are and what they sometimes do. And that includes us.
Warm
Don’t worry about being cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Life
is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead. Head for the warm people.
Head for life.
Dream
Our very existence is a remarkable testimony to human survival. When we
think of the likelihood that, after 150,000 generations, we would end up
here, alive, right now, as us, we are contemplating an improbability so vast
it is almost an impossibility. Think of all the terrible and unlikely stories of
survival, and of each relative above us in the chain of existence having to
stay alive and meet a mate. It is the contemplation of absurd odds. We are
all inside a dream that is real. We are the fires conjured from nothing. We
exist out of near impossibility. And yet we exist.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a—
Clarity
You are here. And that is enough.
The importance of weird thinking
It is good to be weird. It is good to be eccentric. It is good to be separate
from the crowd. The philosopher John Stuart Mill thought it was almost a
civic duty to be eccentric, to break the tyranny of conformity and custom.
But even if we don’t feel outwardly eccentric, we all have eccentric parts.
Thoughts that crop up on the peripheries of our thinking. Random sparks
we can set alight. Thoughts that offer the other point of view or the other
side of a political argument. Thoughts that don’t quite fit in with our other
thoughts. Tastes that go against our other tastes. And as we grow older it is
good to keep tending to those unconventional parts of ourselves—the
thoughts that buck the trend—because these are the parts that will keep us
new and capable of surprise. They will stop us becoming a cover version of
ourselves. They will help us become new songs.
Outside
Yes, sure, it is comfortable to be on the inside. Sheltered, protected. But
there is a comfort to the outside too. Because outside is freedom. Outside
you can keep moving until you find a place of your own. Or you can decide
that outside is your place. And stay there.
Realization
I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn’t fit in was
because I didn’t want to.
The way out of your mind is via the world
By the age of thirty-two, Ludwig van Beethoven’s deafness was
accelerating fast. He wrote to his brothers to convey his despair that people
judged him as “malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic” when really he was
just in a state of inner turmoil due to his advancing condition. He wrote that
he felt like a “hopeless case” because he hadn’t been writing much music,
which is like Shakespeare calling himself a bit of a slacker for taking a
while to write Hamlet.
Beethoven recalled times when he was in the countryside and a shepherd
was singing or someone was playing a flute and he hadn’t been able to hear
a thing. Such instances had brought him to despair and he “would have put
an end to my life—only Art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed
impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon
me to produce . . .”
Only Art it was that withheld me.
And so he stayed alive. Even as his deafness increased—the ultimate
torture for the ultimate musician—he continued to create. Indeed, some of
his greatest works, such as his brilliantly brooding and atmospheric Piano
Sonata No. 14—commonly known as the “Moonlight Sonata”—were
created when he was entirely deaf.
• • •
What a tragic thought that the man who created some of the most well-
known music in the world never heard a lot of it. But he had a passion. And
the history of the arts is filled with sensitive-minded people who have been
consoled and given purpose by the art they create, from Emily Dickinson to
Georgia O’Keeffe.
We don’t need to write piano sonatas, but what we do need is to be
immersed in our passions. It can be anything outside of ourselves. A few
years ago, I kid you not, I helped pull myself out of a moderate anxiety
patch by getting deeply into the first four seasons of Game of Thrones.
Curiosity and passion are the enemies of anxiety. Even when I fall deeply
into anxiety, if I get curious enough about something outside of me it can
help pull me out. Music, art, film, nature, conversation, words.
Find a passion as large as your fear.
The way out of your mind is via the world.
Joy Harjo and the one whole voice
“Everyone comes into the world with a job to do,” wrote Joy Harjo. “I don’t
mean working for a company, a corporation—we were all given gifts to
share, even the animals, even the plants, minerals, clouds . . . All beings.”
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the
Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the first Indigenous American to become
the United States poet laureate. Her poems are beautiful, and draw on her
heritage and the depths of the human subconscious. She is an activist, but
her activism isn’t confined to one area. She has spoken about the rights of
Indigenous Americans, feminism and climate change, and feels these are all
interconnected. Indeed, that is a theme of her work. The holistic nature of
things. “To pray you open your whole self / To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
/ To one whole voice that is you.”
Harjo embodies this in other ways too. When she performs she fuses
prose and poetry and music as if they are all the same thing. She wrote a
piece called “Ahhhh Saxophone” and with that instrument, she says, “all
that love we humans carry makes a sweet deep sound and we fly a little.”
She has won awards for her music as well as her poetry. The interesting
thing is that she was in her forties before she learned to play the saxophone.
Well, it’s interesting—and comforting—to me because it tells me it is really
never too late to begin something valuable.
I abandoned the piano at the age of thirteen. Up until then my parents had
been paying for me to attend weekly piano lessons with a piano teacher,
Mrs. Peters. But then I became the adolescent who didn’t want to tell his
friends he couldn’t see them on Friday evening because he was having
piano lessons. Other interests took over my young mind, and learning
Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and Mozart’s “Gavotte” seemed suddenly an
irrelevant chore.
Many times over the years I have regretted that decision, wondering what
it would have been like if I had kept going. And yet, for all that wondering,
I never actively did anything about it until this year, at the age of forty-five,
when I began to relearn the piano with my kids during lockdown. Of
course, it is humiliating trying to learn anything side-by-side with an
eleven- and twelve-year-old. It is like trying to learn to swim beside a
sailfish. But it was great to make progress, to actually play, and to realize
that there is no cut-off age for development.
Joy Harjo is not the only musical late starter, of course. Leonard Cohen
famously didn’t begin his musical career until deep in his thirties. Though
gifted musically from a young age, Verdi wrote most of his best stuff after
the age of fifty, including his opera of Otello that he finished aged seventy-
three.
I will never be as musically competent as Verdi, or Joy Harjo, or even, as
it turns out, a fast-learning twelve-year-old, but I have access to the ability
to play music, and enjoy playing music, and that is enough. The joy of
music is in the music. The playing of it. The listening to it. And it is a joy
with a wide-open door, welcoming all.
That’s all we can do, right? Keep as many doors open as possible. Keep
embracing the whole of ourselves. Keep failing. As Harjo herself says,
“There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.”
Protection
Once upon a time I felt pressure not to let people down. I stayed doing work
I hated. Went to parties I didn’t really want to be at. Saw people I found
agonizingly hard to converse with. Faked every smile.
And then my mind exploded.
After which I realized it is better to let people down than to blow yourself
up.
Quantum freedom
According to quantum physics, the laws of the universe are probabilistic.
This means that even among the smallest particles, nothing is entirely
predictable. There is always uncertainty and things that can’t be entirely
predicted and measured. Determinism fails in the face of quantum reality.
The German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who came up with the
uncertainty principle—or rather, the Uncertainty Principle—discovered that
even if every single initial condition is known, it is still impossible to
predict with any fixed certainty the behavior of waves and particles.
Likewise, chaos theory explains how even things on a bigger scale, like
weather, are not entirely predictable and can’t ever be. (How many times
have we been surprised by a day of sunshine when we were told to expect
showers?) Similarly, neuroscientists have shown us that the very structure
of our brain, and the nerve cells within it, also acts with elements of
randomness.
In other words, a key defining feature of the universe, of nature, of our
environment, of us, is uncertainty. There is always a space for chance. As
something begins to change or move, it changes with a degree of the
unknown, whether it is light through a slit in a barrier or a hurricane or a
brain cell. The universe is, essentially, an ever-evolving possibility. While
fear might want us to imagine the worst is certain, the future—like
everything else—remains uncertain, unpredictable, open, free. And even the
very smallest event in the maze that is our lives can result in the most
unexpected outcome.
Other people are other people
Let’s state the obvious, because the obvious is easy to take for granted and
forget. You are not other people. You are you. You have no control over
other people. You have no absolute control over what they think of the
world or of politics or of you. You have no control over what harm they
may have done. Even if the harm they have done is to you. Yes, of course
we can often learn from each other, and sometimes people learn from you.
And that’s great, even if it is rarer than we like to admit. As Ayishat Akanbi
put it, “If you’ve decided your healing is dependent on other people
acknowledging their faults you’ll still be waiting in your grave.” You don’t
punish anyone other than yourself by keeping hate inside you. Other people
are other people. You are you.
Wrong direction
Your self-worth is not found inside the minds of other people.
Applied energy
History can be a comfort. It helps us understand our place in time, and to
appreciate what humans have done and lived through in the past for us to
end up here.
Discovering the human stories of the past, in particular, can give us a
kind of strength. Knowing what human beings achieved, what they
survived, and that some of them managed to make the world better for us to
live in today.
Have you heard of Nellie Bly?
She was one of the most inspiring journalists ever to have lived.
Nellie Bly was in fact a pen name. When she was born in Pittsburgh in
1864 she was christened Elizabeth Jane Cochran. After her father died
when she was fifteen, she and her mother and fourteen siblings were left
with little money and so Bly went out to try and earn some.
At a time when women were a rare and actively discouraged sight in
journalism, Bly managed to get a job for her local newspaper, earning five
dollars a week. However, she was told she was to write only about domestic
things like childcare and housework. Despite that, the popularity of her
column allowed her to start writing in a more investigative way, and she
moved onto meatier issues such as the impact of divorce laws on women.
In 1887 she moved to New York and managed to meet the famous
newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. She wanted to work for his
publication, New York World, but in a test of her commitment he said that
her first piece would be an investigation into conditions at Blackwell’s
Island Asylum, a notorious “lunatic” asylum for women. The catch was that
Bly would need to go undercover. In other words, she would need to
pretend to be insane and get committed there.
This was no easy task. She checked into a boarding house called
Temporary Homes for Females and stayed up all night to give herself a
drained and disheveled appearance. Then she put on a wild-eyed act of
insanity, and—following psychiatric evaluation—was sent to the asylum.
There, she experienced and witnessed hellish conditions. Bullying staff.
Mentally ill women tied up together with ropes. Rat-infested wards. Rotten
food. Dirty drinking water. Shared bath water. Hard benches. Cruel
punishments. One of the things she quickly noted was that many of the
women didn’t seem insane at all yet were treated horrifically. Bly believed
that a few hours of being there would test the mind of any sane person.
From the moment she arrived Bly dropped her act of insanity and acted
as she normally would. Yet she noticed that every normal thing she did—
like ask the staff if they had taken her pencil—was treated as further proof
of insanity: “The more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to
be.” She also witnessed the most severely ill patients being actively
provoked.
It was ten days before the New York World told the asylum the truth, and
that their reporter should be released. It was a harrowing assignment. Yet by
witnessing and writing about her experience, Bly helped shift the American
public’s view of asylums and mental illness.
As a direct result of her two-part article “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” the
state department in charge of the asylum had its budget raised by a million
dollars. Even more impressive, her list of recommendations was taken on
board by the Department of Public Charities and Correction, and this
resulted in the closure of the asylum a few years later.
Nellie Bly became famous. And helped usher in a new age of intense,
undercover journalism.
She went on to report all kinds of dramatic stories, a far cry from the kind
of domestic fare she had initially been encouraged to write about in
Pittsburgh. She covered everything from government corruption to baby-
buying scandals.
In 1889 she became even more famous as the person who broke the
fictional record set by Phileas Fogg in the Jules Verne novel Around the
World in Eighty Days, when she embarked on a 24,900-mile trip around the
globe and completed it in a whisker over seventy-two days. While on the
trip she met Jules Vernes in Paris, visited a leper colony in China, and
journeyed along the Suez Canal. She traveled on boats and trains and even
the occasional donkey.
The remarkable thing is that even as other people were sent out to beat
her, she refused to treat it as a race. And her reporting shows how much she
appreciated every moment of beauty in her journey. “I always liked fog,”
she wrote, “it lends such a soft, beautifying light to things that otherwise in
the broad glare of day would be rude and commonplace.”
Years later, during the First World War, she became the first female
reporter to visit the conflict zone between Serbia and Austria, and was even
arrested—but quickly freed—when she was mistaken for a British spy.
Nowadays her legacy lives on, and she has had all kinds of things named
after her: press awards, boats, an ice cream parlor, even an amusement park.
A testimony to what a human can do, armed with little more than a sharp
pencil and a sharper mind.
As Bly herself put it, “Energy rightly applied and directed will
accomplish anything.”
She had resisted every role society had wanted her to fit into and became
who she wanted to be.
Mess
The hardest thing to be is yourself. We are so overloaded that we can’t
always see the truth of who we are. We distract ourselves to distraction.
Sometimes we clutter our lives deliberately to take our minds off the clutter
inside our heads. When we take the external clutter away, we have to face
the clutter inside ourselves. All the mess. And the more we focus on it, the
more we see the order in it. There is a reason why everything is where it is.
We might want to order the mess a different way, or we might feel the mess
is perfectly fine. But we are imperfect because we are alive.
• • •
We are messy because the universe began with an explosion and the debris
has drifted ever since. We are all messy mammals on a messy planet in a
messy cosmos. To deny mess is to deny who we are. To see it, to allow it, to
forgive it, is to reach a state of what Buddhist and psychologist Tara Brach
calls “radical acceptance,” where we can appreciate our so-called flaws or
imperfections as a natural part of existence. And then we can exist with
openness and honesty, rather than shrink ourselves by trying to shut
ourselves away like the contents of a cluttered cupboard. We can, in short,
live.
Aim to be you
If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you.
Aim to look and act and think like you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it.
Cherish it. Love it. And don’t give a fuck if people mock you for it.
Cup
You have no control over who people think you are. So don’t worry. If they
want to hate a fictional version of you that lives in their minds, let them.
Don’t drain yourself trying to be understood by people who insist on not
understanding you. Keep your cup full. Go to the kindness.
Pomegranate
Much of gossip is envy in disguise. Much of self-doubt is conformity in
disguise. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” said
Eleanor Roosevelt. Breathe into you. Step out of the shade. Be you in the
wide open. The only success that matters is the success of being who you
are. Fitting in is fine. But never try and fit in if this fitting-in means
becoming something you are not. Become you. Become the person no one
else is. If people don’t like you, let them not like you. Not every fruit has to
be an apple. It is too exhausting to spend this existence as someone else. If
you are a pomegranate, be a pomegranate. Sure, there are probably more
people who don’t like pomegranates than people who don’t like apples, but
for those of us who like pomegranates they are what we like best.
Let it be
Get out of your own way. Being yourself isn’t something you have to do.
You were born yourself, and you didn’t even have to try. In fact, trying is
the whole problem. You can’t try to be. You can only let yourself be.
PART FOUR
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Rebecca Elson, “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” A Responsibility to Awe
The sky
Imagine if you had never seen the night sky.
Imagine if the night sky only existed once in every lifetime. Imagine if
you could only once look up and see those stars. It would probably be one
of the highlights of your existence. It would possibly be known as The
Night of Starry Miracles or The Amazing Moment of Witnessing the
Shining Universe, or something a bit catchier. We would all step away from
our sofas and another evening spent in front of our streaming service of
choice and head outside and look upward, openmouthed in wonder at the
thousands of pinpoints of light sent through time and space. We would be
there gazing at the moon and trying to distinguish stars from planets.
Wondering which one was Venus.
The point is, it would be nearly impossible to take the sight of such a
one-off sky for granted.
And yet we obviously take the night sky for granted. And of course it
would be entirely impractical to suggest that—even on cloudless nights
with low light pollution—we should be out there gazing up in sentimental
wonder at constellations. But it is always good to know how wonderful so
much of life would instantly seem if it was made rare. We are so blessed
with an abundance of wonder on this planet, and in this universe, that we
are numb to it. And it is often only in times of intense crisis that such things
become apparent. That we can each see ourselves, in philosopher Alan
Watts’s phrase, as “an aperture through which the universe is looking at and
exploring itself.”
Watch the stars
I can remember one night in the middle of a depression feeling suicidal and
looking up at a cloudless sky of infinite stars. I felt a mental pain so deep it
was physical. But seeing the sky, our small glimpse of the universe, flooded
me with hope that I would one day be able to appreciate such a sight again.
Beauty is any moment that makes us gasp with the hope and wonder of life,
and the world is full of such moments. They shine in the dark. And they are
ours for the taking. “Dwell on the beauty of life,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in
his Meditations two millennia ago, “watch the stars, and see yourself
running with them.”
The universe is change
When he wrote Meditations, Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man
in the world. He had, quite literally, a whole empire at his disposal. Cities,
armies, palaces. All were his. He spent over a decade, from the year 161 to
180, as Roman emperor during the “Golden Age.” And yet he resisted
seeking any contentment in his status and power, in favor of simplicity,
consultation, and a cosmic perspective. He believed watching the stars was
important and talks about Pythagoras—the early Greek philosopher and
founder of Pythagoreanism—as his influence here.
The Pythagoreans saw gazing up at the sky not just as a pleasant thing to
do, but an insight into a divine order. Because stars are all separate, but all
together in an order. For the Stoics, looking at them was looking at unveiled
glimpses of divinity—and also fragments of Nature.
It is not just the sky or the stars, then, that are important, but what we
think when we look at them. Our connection to the shifting world around
and above us.
“The universe is change,” wrote Marcus Aurelius. “Our life is what our
thoughts make it.”
Even a man in charge of an empire could look at the stars and feel
happily small in the grand universal order of things.
The sky doesn’t start above us. There is no starting point for sky. We live
in the sky.
The Stoic slave
My all-time favorite philosopher is Epictetus. Like Marcus Aurelius, he was
a Stoic who lived in Ancient Rome. Unlike Marcus Aurelius, he wasn’t an
emperor. In fact, he was about as far away from an emperor as you can get.
He had a tough life. Born into slavery almost two thousand years ago, his
name literally meant “acquired.” He spent all his youth as a slave, though
he was allowed to study Stoic philosophy. He was also physically disabled
—possibly due to his leg being broken by his master. He spent most of his
life in physical pain.
Epictetus eventually became a free man, for reasons that aren’t clear, and
began to teach philosophy, but even then he lived very simply, with few
possessions, and lived alone for much of his life. Records show that in his
old age he adopted a child of a friend and raised that child with a woman
whom Epictetus may or may not have married.
Epictetus was a very modern philosopher in some ways. His worldview is
probably best summed up by his statement “It’s not what happens to you,
but how you react that matters.” It is a philosophy that has been credited
with helping people in tough circumstances, from prisoners of war to
people experiencing depression. The psychologist Albert Ellis, one of the
originators of cognitive behavioral therapy, cites this Epictetus quote as
influencing his entire therapeutic approach: “Man is disturbed not by things,
but by the views he takes of them.”
Epictetus reminds us that when we tie our happiness to external things,
we are essentially giving up the idea of self-control and placing our well-
being on forces outside of ourselves. Whatever it is—earnings,
relationships, wanting a family, a Lamborghini, winning the lottery, going
viral on social media—“Just keep in mind: the more we value things
outside our control, the less control we have.” And of course, even when we
get the things we think we want, the impact is often beyond our prediction
—see, for instance, the studies into how winning the lottery often has a
negative impact on the winners happiness.
The comfort of Epictetus is the deepest comfort there is. It isn’t the
reassurance of believing great things will happen to us, it is that of knowing
that even in pain or sadness or confinement, the mind has power to choose
its response to the events in our lives. Even the very biggest things. Pain,
loss, grief, death. “I cannot escape death,” he said, “but at least I can escape
the fear of it.” Epictetus, in short, gives us control in an uncontrollable
world. The control of accepting a lack of control. The control of response.
Caterpillar
In the dark cocoon, a caterpillar falls apart. It disintegrates in its own
enzymes. It becomes liquid. Mush. Caterpillar soup. And then, slowly, it is
reborn a butterfly. Cocoons aren’t a cozy quiet resting place. Cocoons must
feel a pretty horrendous place for a caterpillar. Yet, the caterpillars fate has
proven a great metaphor for our own misfortunes and struggles. The
greatest changes stem from the darkest experiences. We fall apart to become
new. We go through the dark to fly in the sun.
Experience
We are not what we experience.
If we stand in a hurricane, it doesn’t matter how violent or terrifying the
hurricane is, we always know that the hurricane is not us. The weather
outside and inside us is never permanent. People talk about dark clouds
over them. But we are never the clouds; we are the sky. We just contain
them. The clouds are just the present view. The sky stays the sky.
A bit about breathing
I want to tell you that breathing is deeply important.
I know, I know.
This makes me “that person.” The person who tells you to think about
your breathing as if all the problems in the world are caused by an inability
to exhale for a count of five. It makes me a millimeter away from being
someone who will tell you that handling your trauma is something that can
be done via a long bath and a couple of lavender-scented candles. And yet I
have realized over the years that there is no quicker indicator of where my
stress levels are at than checking where my breathing is at.
Breath is a kind of in-built mood barometer.
When I used to have full-blown panic attacks, breathing was hard. It was
something that happened rapid-fire, right at the top of my lungs, as if I
didn’t even have time for air. When I am stressed I can lie in bed and place
my hand on my stomach and take a deep breath and then, toward the end,
my stomach will quiver like a frightened animal, and I will know. I will
know that now is the time to step back and allow myself to relax. It sounds
like a paradox, but making the effort to relax can sometimes work. And the
easiest and quickest way for me is through slow breathing. When I make
myself breathe slowly it is as if the annoying voices in my mind—the ones
that play on rotation like annoying YouTube rants—are suddenly quiet. It
becomes almost instantly okay that I didn’t get back to that email, or that I
messed up a Zoom meeting. I can feel myself stilling.
Breathing consciously seems to be a way to hack into your self-esteem. A
way to say Give yourself a break. A way to just accept you as you and life
as life. And all you need is a pair of lungs.
You can do it lying down or sitting or standing. If I am lying down, I
place my arms by my side, palms facing the sky or ceiling, and have my
feet a little way apart. If I am sitting, I rest my arms on the chair and have
my feet hip-width apart. Then I breathe gently but deeply into my stomach.
And yes, I count to five, silently, because the trance-like focus of the
counting itself seems to have an added relaxing effect. And ideally I do this
for over a minute. If you have five minutes, seriously, try and do it for five
minutes. Hell, even longer. It can feel boring at first—because a busy brain
wants nothing less and needs nothing more than to slow down—but it is
worth it.
You are here. You exist. You are in this moment.
To breathe is to live, I suppose, and to be aware of breathing is to be
aware of living, to be aware of the very simplest truth of yourself, and
transcend the world of doing and—for a few sweet, comforting moments—
inhabit the world of being.
What your breath tells you
You are enough.
You need no more than you. You are more than how you are seen. You
are who you are in the dark. You are who you are in the silence. You do not
need to buy or train or earn your acceptance.
You are enough.
You are a cosmic miracle. You are the earth witnessing itself. You inhale
the air and accept yourself as you accept that air, as a part of the natural
order of things. You are the mind that exists in the act of changing. You are
possibility in motion. You belong here. You are where you need to be.
You are enough.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Live in the raw
The true challenge we face is to look at ourselves and the world honestly.
To see what wounds there are, so we can help heal them. Not to flinch. Not
to spend our life wrapped in denial and trying to avoid pain. Not to avoid
the feelings. As Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön put it, “the most
fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not
having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and
gently.” Healing means to live in the raw.
Honest seeing
Ignorance shrinks us. The true challenge we face is to look at ourselves and
the world honestly. One of the challenges Marcus Aurelius set himself was
“to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
Wait
You are okay. You may feel like you are in a nightmare. Your mind might
be beating you up. You may think you aren’t going to make it. But
remember a time you felt bad before. And think of something good that
happened since, in the interim. That specific goodness may or may not
happen again, but some goodness will. Just wait.
The cure for loneliness
Loneliness isn’t an absence of company. Loneliness is felt when we are lost.
But we can be lost right in the middle of a crowd. There is nothing lonelier
than being with people who aren’t on your wavelength. The cure for
loneliness isn’t more people. The cure for loneliness is understanding who
we are.
Patterns
It is easy to get stuck in a pattern of behavior. Think of the people you
know. Do they do some of the same things over and over? Do they like the
same kind of food and drink? Watch the same kind of TV? Read the same
genre of books? Do they get up and go to bed at roughly the same time? Do
they say the same kinds of things? Have the same kinds of thoughts? Do
you? Do I? Yes. To be human—to be alive—is to fall into patterns of
behavior. Some of these patterns are good. We are drawn to the comfort of
routine, and we settle in, but there can also be a discomfort in going through
the same motions. Just as slumping for hours in the same position can be
bad for ours backs, it is also true that taking the familiar and repetitive path
of least resistance can cause our lives to become a bit stuck in place. We
become outdated algorithms needing a new and bigger sequence.
The act of changing our routine is good for us. Even something as simple
as rearranging apps on a phone helps us to resist the automatic default of
muscle memory.
As Tara Brach put it: “Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that
freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old
patterns . . . We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel
authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each
day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
The discomfort zone
A kind of timidity can set in with familiarity. A fear of change. We can end
up stuck in jobs we don’t like, in unhealthy relationships, with similar
unhelpful attitudes. We call this the “comfort zone” but often it is the
opposite. A discomfort zone, a stagnation zone, an unfulfilled zone. It is
surprisingly easy to walk through and out, once we decide to. And what we
see beyond the discomfort zone is in fact a deeper comfort. The comfort of
being the best possible version of us. Beyond the pattern or code of
established behavior. Less coded, more human.
Stuff
You don’t always have to do stuff. Or achieve stuff. You don’t have to
spend your free time productively. You don’t have to be doing Tai Chi and
DIY and bread-making. Sometimes you can just be and feel things and get
through and eat chips and survive, and that is more than enough.
Ferris Bueller and the meaning of life
Ferris Buellers Day Off (1986) is the best teen movie of all time but for
years I had a problem with it, even though I enjoyed it immensely. John
Hughes’s tale of a popular teenager skipping school by faking illness, then
having a sensational day out in Chicago with his best friend and girlfriend,
annoyed me because I thought Ferris was selfish and this seemed like a
movie where liking the central character was essential for its enjoyment.
My issue was that he uses his best friend, Cameron, by making him take his
dad’s vintage Ferrari on their adventure, even though Cameron will get in
major trouble for this.
Rewatching the movie, though, I realized I’d got it all wrong. Really, this
isn’t a movie about the eponymous Ferris. This is a movie about Cameron.
Cameron is the emotional center of the film. He is the one who makes the
most significant transition—from a depressed, possibly suicidal, outwardly
privileged teenager who frets about the perceived meaninglessness of a
future containing college and adulthood, to someone with self-esteem, who
is able to live in the present, and to stand up to his strict father and his
oppressive rules.
When Ferris starts the movie with his famous monologue he talks straight
to the camera, but the core message is one he spends the rest of the film
teaching Cameron: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look
around once in a while, you could miss it.” Ferris is basically a 1980s
version of Marcus Aurelius saying, “Dwell on the beauty of life.” He is a
mix of Eastern and Western philosophy. Buddhist mindfulness fused with
American individualism—though he wouldn’t want to be part of any -ism.
“A person shouldn’t believe in an -ism,” says Ferris. “He should believe in
himself.” But Ferris isn’t just out for himself. He is out for his friend too.
He is out for us. As with all the most comforting films, the film gives us
permission to feel. It helps us live.
Films that comfort
Jaws. Because it shows that we need to acknowledge our fears before we
beat them.
Meet Me in St. Louis. Because of the songs. Because of the colors. Because
of Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
Because it invites us into the beautiful and bittersweet comfort of another
time, another place, another family, another reality. And because I
watched it on a day I felt terrible and it gave me a better place to exist.
The Great Escape. Because it shows that you can cope with any situation so
long as you are building a tunnel out of it.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Because it exudes a golden fireside
glow and makes us remember that we can live forever inside a freeze-
frame if it is a good enough moment (see also the end of The 400 Blows
and The Breakfast Club).
E.T. Because you become a child again when you watch it.
It’s a Wonderful Life. Because it makes you realize your existence has
unseen value.
The Peanut Butter Falcon. Because it shows the redemptive power of
friendship.
The Count of Monte Cristo (2002 version). Because this swashbuckling
adventure is the definition of escapism.
Pretty in Pink. Because it has the greatest pop soundtrack in the history of
cinema.
Ray . Because well-crafted biopics are always inspiring, especially when the
subject is Ray Charles.
My Neighbor Totoro. Because Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece is a film
about the power of wonder and magic to comfort us through traumatic
times.
Harvey . Because it is James Stewart talking to an invisible rabbit.
Breaking Away . Because it is a highly underrated film about cycling that I
watched when I was feeling low and found solace in its gentle comedy
and drama.
Any Mission Impossible movie. Because there is something comforting
about watching Tom Cruise risk his life to defy the laws of Newtonian
physics.
The Sound of Music. Because it shows how love and music and joy can’t be
suppressed by the darkest forces in history.
Bringing Up Baby . Because of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and
because, despite being released in 1938, it remains one of the funniest
films ever made.
Toy Story 2. Because it is the greatest and most emotional and consoling
Pixar movie, for Jessie’s story alone.
Stand by Me. Because despite being a film about a search for a dead body, it
is a celebration of youth and friendship and life.
Mary Poppins. Because it is Mary Poppins.
Negative capability
The poet John Keats coined the phrase “negative capability”: meaning
when someone “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It’s about embracing a
kind of vulnerability.
For Keats, Shakespeare was the person who embodied this concept
perfectly, as he created work that was full of a beauty that was incomplete
and ambiguous and allowed for many possible meanings.
Keats never heard Miles Davis play, but maybe he’d have recognized
negative capability in his music. “Don’t play what’s there,” the musician
famously said. “Play what’s not there.”
Negative capability is about the space beyond what we know, which we
should be prepared to reach if we want to find beauty.
“With a great poet,” wrote Keats, the most Zen of the Romantics, “the
sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates
all consideration.”
Keats’s use of negative capability was primarily about art, but it was later
adopted by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who gave it a more
psychological and existential slant. For Bion, negative capability was about
being able to think intuitively, outside of memory and desire. “Discard your
memory,” he implored. “Discard the future tense of your desire; forget . . .
both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.”
A new idea.
I love that. It’s like the Zen Buddhist concept of satori, of enlightenment
through submission, something reached through a quest into the
uncertainties of our own nature. That is where freedom lives. In the
possibility of a new way of thinking. And it is easier to get there if we keep
open and ambiguous and alert to the fluidity of the moment.
Maybe we only exist because of some cosmic negative capability that
conjured the universe into being out of the void.
It is okay not to know everything. It might be better and wiser not to
know everything, or at least to avoid thinking we know everything, because
then we are freer from habitual thinking. But sure, it takes a vulnerability to
enter a place of total openness, and maybe a new and deeper understanding
of comfort.
I always remember once, years ago, doing a workout video where the
instructor bellowed an order, midway through a static squat, to “get
comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Now, it may be a bit of a reach to
equate advice offered in a workout to negative capability and Zen
Buddhism, but I feel we reach a higher kind of comfort, a closer union with
who we actually are, when we are willing to move out of safe and known
patterns toward—to be Keatsian about it—the unknowing beauty of life.
As Wilfred Bion put it, “Beauty makes a very difficult situation
tolerable.”
We don’t have to work everything out. We can just witness the beauty.
Why break when you can bend?
You don’t have to cope with everything. You don’t have to handle
everything. You don’t have to keep a lid on every-thing to get through a
day.
You can’t turn tides. You can’t defy gravity. You can’t go against the grain
without getting splinters.
But you can drop the disguise. You can feel what you feel. You can stretch
out inside yourself.
You can cry. You can feel. You can show what you are.
You can, in fact, be you.
We have more in common than we think
It is easy to hate everyone these days. It’s easy to go on the internet or
switch on the news and feel despair. It’s easy to find reasons to be angry.
We have social media apps whose very business model depends on our
ongoing capacity for fury and frustration.
It’s easy to be surrounded so entirely by a single view that almost anyone
without that view becomes alien.
But.
We can look at the world through more than one lens. If we look at
people through the lens of emotion, at the feelings that drive opinions,
rather than the opinions themselves, it’s easy to see the things we share. The
hopes, the fears, the loves, the insecurities, the longings, the doubts, the
dreams.
Other people can be wrong, and we can be wrong, and that is another
thing we have in common.
The capacity for fucking up. And for forgiving.
Forgiveness
Forgiving other people is great practice for forgiving yourself when the
time comes.
A note on introversion
Introversion is not something you fix via extroversion. You fix it by seeing
it as something not to be fixed. Let introversion exist. Allow journeys
inward as well as outward.
Resting is doing
You don’t need to be busy. You don’t need to justify your existence in terms
of productivity. Rest is an essential part of survival. An essential part of us.
An essential part of being the animals we are. When a dog lies in the sun I
imagine it does it without guilt, because as far as I can tell dogs seem more
in tune with their own needs. As I grow older, I think that resting might
actually be the main point of life. To sit down passively, inside or outside,
and merely absorb things—the tick of a clock, a cloud passing by, the
distant hum of traffic, a bird singing—can feel like an end in itself. It can
actually feel and be more meaningful than a lot of the stuff we are
conditioned to see as productive. Just as we need pauses between notes for
music to sound good, and just as we need punctuation in a sentence for it to
be coherent, we should see rest and reflection and passivity—and even
sitting on the sofa—as an intrinsic and essential part of life that is needed
for the whole to make sense.
Mystery
Think of the works of art that stand the test of time, from the Mona Lisa to
Middlemarch. There is always something unsolvable about them.
Something critics can debate passionately centuries later with no final
certainty. Maybe the art of living is like that too. Maybe the purpose is the
mystery, not beyond it. Maybe we aren’t meant to know everything about
our lives. And maybe that’s perfectly okay.
The comfort of uncertainty
Uncertainty feeds our anxiety. Uncertainty and anxiety are intrinsically
linked. The more anxious we are, the harder we will find tolerating
uncertainty. We might write lists, avoid delegating. We might seek constant
reassurance. We might double check that we locked the door, or repeatedly
want to call someone to check they are okay. We might find ourselves
clasping control and unwilling to trust others. We might want to retreat
from an anxious world and stay indoors and procrastinate. We might want
to escape it altogether by losing ourselves in a world of distraction. We
might fill every second of our day with busy activities, with work, with
pleasure, with our other addictions.
Of course, none of these things address the root problem. Uncertainty still
remains. The only way, ultimately, to deal with uncertainty is to accept
uncertainty. Because we can’t escape it. However we choose to timetable
our days and our calendars, uncertainty still remains. This is a stubbornly
uncertain world, and we have to deal with that.
And one way to deal with it is to see the value in uncertainty. Far from
being a curse, uncertainty can be a source of hope. Okay, so yes, it means
that the things we are looking forward to might not be as good as we want
them to be, but it also means that the things we dread might not be as
terrible as we imagine.
For instance, how many times have you heard people talk about blessings
in disguise? How many times have we heard about someone who has been
afflicted with a terrible misfortune—an illness, a redundancy, a bankruptcy,
whatever—then ends up feeling thankful for it, or at least for some aspect
of it?
The moments of deepest pain in my life were also the moments I learned
the most about myself. Just as some of the things we look forward to aren’t
as good as we planned—like a disastrous vacation or a nightmare job that
sounded good on paper, a marriage that turned sour—so it is true that many
of the hard things in life arrive with lessons or silver linings or a welcome
new perspective or reasons to be grateful.
So, while we see uncertainty as innately unwanted, because it means bad
things might happen, uncertainty is also our protection against bad things.
Because at some point, in any life, something bad will happen, and it is the
inherent uncertainty of what that bad thing will ultimately mean to you,
what it will lead to, and what it will reveal, that enables us to have a more
enduring and resilient kind of hope. A hope that doesn’t wish for bad things
not to happen—because they sometimes do—but rather one that enables us
to see that bad things are never the whole story. They are as filled with
uncertain outcomes as everything else.
In short, we never know. The only certainty is uncertainty. And so, if we
are to reach any kind of constant comfort, we need to find comfort in
uncertainty. And it is there. Because while things are uncertain, they are
never closed. We can exist in hope, in the infinite, in the unanswered and
open question of life itself.
Portal
Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change
our mind.
Nothing is closed
One of the reasons we like stories is because we like structure. We like a
beginning, a middle, and an end. We especially like a good ending. Think of
all the times our opinion of a book or a movie has hinged on the ending. If a
movie has a terrible ending it often ruins the whole thing for us.
The film director Jean-Luc Godard said a story should have a beginning,
middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. And I used to love that
quote, and agree with it, until I went through a breakdown and craved the
comfort of classic narratives. Of beginnings and middles and ends in that
order. And I liked endings that wrapped things up nicely, with a big bow.
I craved resolution. But of course, life doesn’t really have a resolution.
Even death isn’t a resolution. Even if we don’t believe in an afterlife, we
have to acknowledge that the world after us goes on in unknowable ways,
and also the ways people will or will not remember us are unknowable too.
There are only open endings in life. And this isn’t a curse. This is a good
thing. As the Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön puts it, “we suffer from
resolution.” I find that idea so liberating. To admit that closure is
unreachable in a universe where everything is open.
The bearable rightness of being
Being > doing
Reconnection
My anxiety feels very much a symptom of modern life. At its deepest, years
ago, I began to notice that it was always at its most acute when I was doing
something that would have been entirely alien to our cave-people ancestors.
Walking in a crowded shopping center. Listening to loud techno music.
Wandering under the artificial light of a supermarket. Sitting for too long in
front of a TV or computer screen. Eating a bag of tortilla chips at one in the
morning. Stressful emails. City centers. Packed trains. Online squabbles.
Modern mental overload.
It is no coincidence that the things that comfort me when I am super-
frazzled, the things that calm and soothe me, tend to be things that
reconnect me to my natural self. So, for instance, going to bed shortly after
it gets dark rather than staying up till one a.m. to watch eleven episodes of a
TV show one after the other. Or walking in nature with our dog. Or cooking
real food with real ingredients. Or being with loved ones. Or switching
from the sofa to physical activity. Or planting some herbs. Or swimming in
the sea. Or staring at the sky. Or running in the fresh air rather than on the
treadmill.
Of course, I love the pleasurable distractions of modern life. I like that
our world is one with podcasts and movies and video calls. But when I am
in that state of deep fragility, where I am stripped of my shell, I find the
shortest path back seems to be the timeless one. The natural one. The one to
do with reconnection to our natural world and our natural selves.
A note on joy
On Madonna’s first trip to New York she is said to have told her taxi driver,
“Take me to the center of everything.” For many years before my
breakdown that was my approach too. I had trouble with just being. I
always wanted to be somewhere else, closer to the center of the excitement.
So I escaped into alcohol. Drugs. Raves. I needed the loudest noise, the
spiciest food, the most violent movies, the most extreme everything. For me
this meant three summers in Ibiza working for the largest nightclub in
Europe, being at the center of noise and people and stimulation. The fact
that the nightclub was called “Manumission,” which meant “freedom from
slavery,” drove the point home for me. To be free was to be in the thick of
all the buzz and distraction life could offer.
I was a deeply insecure person. I had low self-worth. In the winters, back
in London, I would apply for jobs. Then when I got them, I would be so
worried about people seeing through me that I wouldn’t be able to enter the
building. I felt like a human mirage. Empty on the inside. So rather than
face the void, I tried to escape it.
The only problem is that you can’t run away from yourself. Wherever
you go, you’re always there. Even on a dance floor at six in the morning.
Running away from yourself is like trying to run away from a lamppost
with a bungee cord tied around you. Sooner or later you are going to spring
back and have a mighty bump.
Or, in my case, a total breakdown. A full smorgasbord of doom. Panic
disorder, depression, OCD, agoraphobia, and a belief that I wouldn’t be able
to go on living through so much. Which is the irony, of course. My
desperate desire to avoid pain and discomfort led to me feeling the worst
pain and discomfort of my life. It trapped me inside it. For days, months,
years.
And to get out of that I had to ultimately find some kind of acceptance.
This might be a funny thing to say in a book with “comfort” in the title, but
pain is a part of life. A part of all life. And so it is also a part of the good
stuff too. “Inspiration and wretchedness complement each other,” as
Chödrön puts it. But what is good about suffering? What can be comforting
about suffering? Isn’t suffering the opposite of comfort?
At some point, you have to accept your own reality. Even if that reality
includes depression and fear and pain, alongside other things. And when
you accept it, you accept other things too. The more genuinely pleasurable
things. The pleasure that can be found by being yourself, rather than
escaping yourself. Of being able to look someone in the eye, human to
human, without any shame or stigma. Of accepting that life connects joy to
pain and pain to joy within the same breath.
I didn’t need to go out and grab life. I was life.
A spinning coin
Uncertainty is the cause of anxiety, but also a solution. While everything is
uncertain, everything is hope. Everything is ambiguous. Everything is
possible. We exist on a spinning coin. We cannot predict how it will land
but we can enjoy the shine as it spins.
You are alive
You can sound confident and have anxiety. You can look healthy and feel
terrible. You can speak well in public and be a wreck. You can be externally
privileged and not mentally privileged. You can lift barbells and be weak.
You can have everything and feel nothing. You can be cut adrift and look
ashore.
You are something far deeper than your surface. You are something far
deeper than your identity. You are not a value that shifts on a stock market
of external opinion. You are part of something bigger. You are part of life.
You are part of all life. You are an expression of life as much as a dolphin
or a lion is an expression of life. You are part of the whole as much as you
are an individual. If your individualism manifests itself at the cost of your
connection to the whole, you might stumble, but you always have the
chance of reconnection. Because life is the way to reconnect with life. And
you are alive.
One
Numbers are addictive, because they enable us to measure and compare and
quantify while also making us feel there could always be more. And
numbers—and comparisons—are everywhere. Social media followers.
Body measurements. Income brackets. Age. Weight. Online rankings. Click
counts. Unit sales. Likes. Shares. Step counts. Sleep counts. Word counts.
Test scores. House prices. Budget reports. Stock market valuations.
Numbers, numbers, numbers. And the numbers get in. They make us
compare. We compare to other people and we compare to ourselves. We
don’t necessarily do it in a negative way. We might want the best for other
people. For our friends and our family. But far too often numbers are
involved. I think the numbers get to us. Every value is numerical. We
become finite and measurable and of variable value. We lose our sense of
infinity. Of life itself. Where numbers exist, measurements exist. And
measurements limit us. Because measurements take us from an infinite
perspective into a finite perspective. Only finite things can be measured,
after all.
One (two)
If you truly feel part of a bigger picture, if you can see yourself in other
people and nature, if this you becomes something bigger than the individual
you, then you never truly depart the world when you die. You exist as long
as life exists. Because the life you feel inside you is part of the same life
force that exists in every living thing.
Power
The most powerful moment in life is when you decide not to be scared
anymore.
Growing pains
When everything goes well, we tend not to grow. Because to grow we need
to change, because growth is change. It is generally when we face hard
times that we evolve. Often we need to fail in order to learn, just as a
bodybuilder needs weight to resist against. It is impossible to grow in a
world without struggle.
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to
understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I
hope—into a better shape.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
How to look a demon in the eye
It’s easy to want to run away from bad feelings. When we feel sadness or
fear we greet them as problems to be instantly solved or dismissed. I can
remember that when I was first in the middle of a deep depression, I wasn’t
just feeling depressed. I was feeling depressed about feeling depressed.
Anxious about feeling anxious. And so, inevitably, the negative feelings
kept on multiplying themselves.
The key to recovery lay in acceptance. This was the paradox. To escape
depression I had to get to a point where I accepted it. To stop having panic
attacks I had to get to a point where I almost invited them. I would feel that
sudden heightened alertness symptomatic of panic, and I would say to
myself I want this. This is not a strategy you should necessarily follow. And
I certainly don’t mean to belittle the horror of a full-blown panic attack. I
know as well as anyone how utterly terrifying it can be to feel trapped in
your own mind when it is in total freefall. But after a hundred or so panic
attacks I realized something about them. They were self-referential. They
fueled themselves. I mean: the panic became worse because I was
panicking about the panic. It is a rolling snowball of its own making. But if
I stopped myself being frozen about the panic, if I melted into a state of
acceptance, the panic snowball ended up running out of the ice-cold terror
and couldn’t grow. Eventually it would float right through. My mind would
watch the panic rather than fight it. A totally different type of engagement.
Sometimes, situation permitting, rather than trying to ignore the panic or
walk it off, I would just lie down on the floor and close my eyes and really
focus on it. And when you really analyze fear you realize, first, that it is
only a natural part of us. And second, that it is the sister of hope. Because
both are born from the uncertain fabric of life.
In Tibetan the word re-dok is a portmanteau of the words rewa (hope)
and dokpa (fear), acknowledging they coexist and both stem from
essentially the same thing—uncertainty. When we analyze rather than evade
our darkest fears, we learn that even our largest demons are not as
invincible as they first appear. Often, when we stare at them, deeply, they
disintegrate before our eyes.
Remember
There will be other days. And other feelings.
Opposites
What would “big” mean if there was no “small”? Opposites rely on each
other to exist. In Taoist philosophy, the dualistic energies of yin and yang
are opposites but also interdependent. Day needs night and night needs day.
The dark shadows in a painting by Tintoretto accentuate the light. The mute
silence of Maya Angelou’s childhood led to her determination to use her
voice.
In this world of interdependence opposite emotions are also connected.
As William Blake put it, “Joy and woe are woven fine.” I know this.
Because one of the reasons I love life is because I was once suicidal. I have
sincerely known more moments of contentment in my life for having gone
through years of hell. I now avoid trying to see myself as one thing or the
other. I am not a happy person or a sad person. I am not a calm person or a
fearful person. I am a happy-sad-calm-fearful person. I let myself feel it all,
and that way I am always open to new feelings. Nothing gets clogged in the
pipe. No single feeling becomes the only feeling, if you let it all happen.
And the way to let it all happen is to see the value in it all. To see the way
the dark might lead to light. And the way present pain might lead to future
hope.
Love/despair
Albert Camus said, “There is no love of life without despair of life.” When
I first came across that quote I thought it was empty and pretentious and
more than a little bleak. But as I grew older the words became truer. My
love of life stems almost directly from despair. In the sense that I am
grateful for better times having known terrible times. But in a deeper sense
too. In the sense that pleasure and despair are contained in the same whole,
and when we start to see the connections between all things, when we see
how opposites are contained within each other, when we see the way
everything connects, we can feel more empowered at our lowest points.
Possibility
The existential philosopher Rollo May believed that we often mistake
opposites. “Hate is not the opposite of love,” he said, “apathy is.” He also
pointed out that courage and fear aren’t opposites, as fear is an essential
component of bravery, and that the truly courageous are those who
experience fear and move through it. He was most informative of all,
though, when arguing for the compatibility of joy and despair.
“Joy is the experience of possibility,” he wrote, “the consciousness of
one’s freedom as one confronts one’s destiny. In this sense despair . . . can
lead to joy. After despair, the one thing left is possibility.”
The door
Everything in front of us is defined by possibility. We are never inside the
future. We are outside the door. We have our hand on the handle. We are
turning the handle. But we never know what is on the other side of the door.
It may be a room similar to the one we are standing in, or it might be a
room we have never seen before. It might not be a room at all. It might be
an orchard bearing all the ripe fruits of our labor. It might be wasteland. But
we can never be sure. And even if we end up somewhere we don’t want to
be, we can be thankful for the knowledge that another door exists. And
another beautiful handle, waiting to be turned.
The messy miracle of being here
The Western idea of self-empowerment requires you to become better,
discover your inner billionaire, get beach-bodied, work, upgrade. It says the
present is not enough. It’s self-loathing masquerading as salvation.
We need self-acceptance. Self-compassion. Our present bodies and minds
and lives are not things we have to escape. We need to remember the messy
miracle of being here.
Acceptance
There comes a beautiful point where you have to stop trying to escape
yourself or improve yourself and just allow yourself.
Basic nowness
In Buddhism there is the concept of mettā, or maitrī, meaning benevolence
or “loving-kindness.” Mettā is about accepting yourself as you are. There is
no intent to change you, but rather an acceptance of yourself and all things
as change.
As Pema Chödrön explains in When Things Fall Apart, what makes this
concept radical is that there is no attempt to become a better person. It is
about “giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall
apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the
beginning nor the end.” Once that happens, you can see that whatever you
are feeling is within the normal human range and has been felt by humans
since the beginning of our history. “Thoughts, emotions, moods, and
memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.”
The concept of mettā goes beyond self-compassion, though. In a mettā
meditation the aim is to extend compassion first to yourself, then to family
and friends, and then beyond that to all beings. Even the difficult ones who
annoy us or make us angry. Often this is done via a mantra that begins by
focusing on ourselves then moves on to focusing on all of life, spreading
out in widening concentric circles of compassion like ripples in a pond.
May I be safe and live happily . . . May she be safe and live happily . . .
May they be safe and live happily . . . May all living beings be safe and live
happily.
It’s beautiful. The idea is that extending compassion to all things helps us
to connect to the unity of life. We feel the world’s suffering but experience
too the joy of life and all nature. We become a part of all things through
compassion. We become the metaphorical fire, earth, air, and water. We
become what we always were. Life itself.
How to be an ocean
You haven’t failed,
In a moment of sadness.
You haven’t lost,
In a moment of defeat.
You are not a statue
Standing in an eternal contrapposto.
You are a thing in motion:
A rising tide, a cresting wave.
Your vast depths witness
Every marvel, every wonder.
You are, then, marvelous,
And wonderful. So:
Don’t fight the moon.
Allow every tide.
And give all your wrecked ships
The space to hide.
More
In troublesome moments, the beauty of life can come into sharper focus.
And the things we learn in the bad days serve us in the good times. Just as
the promise of good times helps us through the bad. Everything connects.
All life is within us. Fear to calm, hope to hopelessness, despair to comfort.
A grain of sand can tell us about a universe. And a single moment can teach
us about every other moment. We are never only one thing.
Just as our ancestors saw the world as a composite of earth, fire, water,
and air—so we can see in any moment, in any individual, a connection to
all the other elements of that existence. We always have the possibility to be
more. To be bigger than any current crisis or worry. To discover something
new about the landscape of our mind, not by adding to it but by realizing it
was there all along. The way a page in a book is there even if we haven’t
read it yet.
We always have more inside us than we realize. More strength, more
warmth, more compassion, more resilience.
The world can surprise us, sure, but we can surprise ourselves too.
End
Nothing truly ends.
It changes.
Change is eternal. In being change, you too are eternal. You are here. In this
moving moment. And in being here, you are also forever.
A fire becomes ash, which becomes earth. Sadness becomes joy, sometimes
within the same cry. Birds molt feathers, then grow new ones for winter.
Love becomes grief. Grief becomes memory. Wounds become scars.
Doing becomes being. Pain becomes strength. Noon becomes night.
Rain becomes vapor and then rain again. Hope becomes despair then
hope again.
A pear ripens, falls, transforms as it is tasted.
A caterpillar disappears into its silk-wrapped cocoon, and things go dark
and then . . .
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent Clare Conville and all at C+W. And to my editor
Francis Bickmore and all at Canongate including Jamie Byng, Jenny Fry,
Lucy Zhou, Alice Shortland, Vicki Watson, Vicki Rutherford, Leila
Cruickshank, Megan Reid, Caroline Gorham, Rebecca Bonallie, Jessica
Neale, Caroline Clarke, Bethany Ferguson, Rafi Romaya, Jo Lord, Katalina
Watt, Steph Scott, and Drew Hunt.
A massive thank-you to all the booksellers for their support over the
years, to all the people on social media who have commented on my online
ramblings, and to all the readers who have stuck with my writing as I switch
back and forth between genres.
And finally, to the wonderful people I live with: Andrea Semple, Pearl
Haig, Lucas Haig, and Betsy the dog.
Permission credits
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their
permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for
any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections
that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Excerpt from An American Sunrise: Poems © 2019 by Joy Harjo.
Published by W. W. Norton and reprinted with permission of the author.
Excerpt from Still the Mind © 2000 by Mark Watts. Reprinted with
permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. newworldlibrary.com
Excerpt from Radical Acceptance © 2003 by Tara Brach. Reprinted with
permission of Penguin Random House.
Excerpt from The Wisdom of Insecurity © 1951 by Alan Watts. Reprinted
with permission of Penguin Random House.
Excerpt from Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan.
Copyright © 1986 by Steven Callahan. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Excerpt of “Eagle Poem” from In Mad Love and War © 1990 by Joy
Harjo. Published by Wesleyan University Press and reprinted with
permission.
Excerpt from “Antidotes to Fear of Death” in A Responsibility to Awe by
Rebecca Elson © Carcanet Press Limited, 2018. Reproduced with
permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
Excerpt from When I Fell from the Sky © 2011 by Juliane Koepcke.
Reprinted with permission of Nicholas Brealey (NB), an imprint of John
Murray Press, Hachette UK.
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